Social Impact ROI for Real Assets: Why the Numbers Matter

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

Social impact is becoming a measurable factor in real asset performance. For investors, asset managers, and ESG leads across real estate and infrastructure, the question is no longer whether social impact (or social value, as it is known in UK procurement) matters, but whether your organisation can measure it credibly enough to present to an investment committee. This article details:

• Five key mechanisms which show how social impact drives returns, including asset value uplift and improved tenant retention, as well as improving planning outcomes, and regulatory readiness
• Selecting the right measurement framework is crucial as it may influence reported numbers on social value ROI.
• Regulatory requirements for social impact reporting are tightening, urging firms to establish credible measurement systems now.
• Investors are prioritising social impact metrics alongside environmental data, making transparent reporting essential for attracting capital.

The Scale of the Opportunity and the Challenge

Real assets, spanning real estate and infrastructure, have made remarkable progress on the “E” in ESG. Energy ratings, carbon targets, and environmental benchmarks are now embedded in asset valuation, tenant expectations, and regulatory compliance.

But the “S” has not kept pace. The social pillar of ESG remains the least developed, the least standardised, and the hardest to connect to financial performance.

That is starting to change:

• In 2019, only 2% of the public trusted real estate developers to have social impact strategies in place
• By 2023, 93% of real estate companies had adopted them

The intent is there. But measurement, data quality, and the ability to present social outcomes with the same rigour as environmental or financial data are still catching up.

So the question we’re considering here is a practical one: how do you build a credible investment case for social impact when the sector is still working out how to measure it?

The numbers give a sense of the importance of this question. Real estate and infrastructure contribute over £117 billion to the UK economy and employ more than 2.4 million people.

But answering this question is not straightforward: multiple measurement frameworks exist, each with different methodologies, proxy values, and governance structures.

The evidence is building, though, that getting this right delivers material, measurable returns.

Five Ways Social Impact Drives Real Asset Returns

The investment case for social impact rests on five mechanisms, each pulling a different commercial lever. None of them are speculative. Each connects a social impact activity to a financial outcome that an investment committee can evaluate.

1. Asset value uplift [Value]

Properties and infrastructure assets with strong social impact credentials attract more investment and command higher rents or usage fees.

Knight Frank’s research shows a sustained flight to quality for high-spec sustainable space, with shorter marketing periods and stronger yields for assets that meet environmental and social benchmarks.

Impact-focused firms with strong ESG performance have been shown to outperform peers over the long term.

The mechanism is straightforward. Social impact activities (local employment, community engagement, wellbeing amenities, place-based interventions) improve the desirability and reputation of an asset and the neighbourhood that surrounds it.

That feeds through to occupier and investor demand, which feeds through to valuation.

2. Tenant retention and reduced voids [Cost]

Social impact enhances occupier and community engagement, translating directly into lower vacancy rates, reduced letting costs, and stronger brand loyalty.

The Better Buildings Partnership’s Responsible Property Management Toolkit positions social value as a driver of occupier and visitor satisfaction, connecting activities like local procurement, volunteering programmes, and community space provision to measurable improvements in how tenants experience a building and its neighbourhood.

For asset managers, the cost equation is simple: longer tenancies and fewer voids reduce operating cost.

Social impact investment is one of the mechanisms that delivers this. CBRE Investment Management’s UK Affordable Housing Fund provides a useful illustration: by capping rents at an average 22% below market rates and investing in resident wellbeing, the fund reports lower tenant turnover, reduced arrears, and more stable income streams.

The social impact and the financial performance are not in tension; they reinforce each other.

3. Planning and de-risking [Risk]

Demonstrable social impact de-risks developments at the planning stage.

Developers and infrastructure investors who embed social value from design, through genuine community co-creation rather than retrospective box-ticking, build stronger relationships with local communities and face fewer planning objections.

Savills describes a four-stage maturity model for social value in real estate (from recognising its importance, through acceptance, to measurement and governance) and argues that investing from the start of a project means future-proofing its viability and profitability.

This is becoming more practical than it was even a year ago. Measurement tools now support place-based social value at the design, planning, and in-use stages of the asset lifecycle, with metrics tailored to the specific context of each location.

What does this look like in practice?

• At design stage, a commercial development in an area with high youth unemployment can set local apprenticeship and employment targets calibrated to the neighbourhood’s deprivation data, then track delivery against those targets through construction and into operation. A residential scheme can commit to directing a proportion of its procurement spend to businesses within a defined radius, or design in green space, community gardens, a running track, or play areas that serve the existing community as well as future residents.

• Before construction starts, meanwhile use of the site can generate social value from day one. Offering space at reduced rent to local start-ups or charities lifts the neighbourhood, adds economic vitality, and builds community relationships before a single foundation is poured. The World Economic Forum’s Social Value Playbook documents how developers at Pier 70 in San Francisco repurposed a warehouse as a temporary events space, raising $3 million for the community while the larger site awaited redevelopment. The space became a permanent anchor for the neighbourhood.

• During the construction phase, schemes can measure the employment and training opportunities they provide, the impact of diverting construction waste from landfill, and the value of partnerships with local schools and colleges.

• During the in-use phase, a shopping centre or office campus can measure community benefit through the provision of free space for NHS outreach clinics, job clubs, or local charity use, and track occupier wellbeing through regular surveys. Local events that boost community cohesion, health and wellbeing programmes, the provision of employment and training opportunities to those in need, skilled advice to local start-ups, and the maintenance of green spaces all contribute measurable social impact.

Two UK examples illustrate how these principles translate into real places.

• Marmalade Lane in Cambridge is a co-housing development born from genuine community co-design after a failed housing project. Future residents were engaged throughout the design and development stages. The result includes a community shop, shared laundry, a communal garden, and a resident-managed gym. Five years after completion, the waiting list is seven times oversubscribed.

• Brent Cross Town in London, an £8 billion regeneration with 6,700 new homes, uses the Flourishing Index developed with the University of Manchester to track community and individual wellbeing through longitudinal studies spanning at least ten years, using surveys, behavioural observation, and environmental sensors.

Each of these activities generates a reportable metric, and those metrics roll up.

An apprenticeship becomes a quantified skills outcome. Local procurement spend becomes measurable economic impact. Community health provision becomes a wellbeing gain.

Aggregated across an asset they produce an asset-level social value figure; aggregated across a portfolio they produce the fund-level KPI an investor or CIO actually tracks, and feed directly into GRESB social scores and the social section of CSRD-aligned reporting.

The line of sight runs from a single apprentice on a single site through to a single number on an investment committee paper. This is how social impact moves from an aspiration on a planning application to an auditable line in a portfolio report.

The ability to present this kind of granular, location-specific evidence at planning stage is a material advantage in a contested planning environment.

4. Regulatory and disclosure readiness [Risk]

The regulatory landscape for social impact disclosure is tightening across multiple fronts. For real assets investors, the most relevant frameworks are:

• SFDR (Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation): requires financial market participants and advisers to disclose how sustainability risks, including social factors, are integrated into investment decisions. Directly relevant to fund managers and institutional investors.
• CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive): expands mandatory sustainability reporting to a much wider set of companies, including social impact metrics. Real assets firms with European operations or listings face disclosure obligations that go well beyond environmental data.
• SFD (Sustainability-related Financial Disclosures): relevant for UK-regulated firms. Aligns with TCFD-style disclosure but is expanding to encompass social as well as environmental factors.
• PPN 0026 and the Procurement Act 2023: for real assets firms that supply into UK public sector procurement, mandatory social value KPIs are arriving. This is secondary context for most readers of this article, but relevant for those with public sector exposure.

The direction of travel across all of these regimes is the same: towards mandatory, auditable social impact disclosure.

The firms that build measurement infrastructure now will be ready when compliance deadlines arrive. Those that wait will face a scramble, and the cost of catching up always exceeds the cost of getting ahead.

5. Investor expectations and ESG benchmarks [Value]

Investors are demanding social impact metrics alongside environmental data with growing urgency. GRESB and other ESG benchmarks weight social factors more heavily with each iteration.

Firms that can demonstrate credible, quantified social impact will be better positioned for capital raising and may benefit from a lower cost of capital. Those that cannot will find investor due diligence more difficult with every reporting cycle.

Why Your Choice of Measurement Matters

Investment committees need to understand something that is often left to the sustainability team: different measurement methodologies produce different financial outcomes, and some frameworks allow you to measure more of what matters.

The choice of framework is not a technical detail. It directly affects the numbers that appear in your ESG disclosures, your GRESB submissions, and your investor reports.

Numbers are not the whole story

There is a growing recognition among the most experienced impact investors that monetised proxy values, while useful, are not sufficient on their own.

Knight Frank’s 2025 ESG Property Investor Survey found that while 76% of investors consider social value in decision-making, only 48% have a framework to measure it, and the lack of standardisation remains the primary barrier.

The challenge is not just producing a number. It is producing evidence that an investment committee will trust.

Proxy values play an important role. They translate social outcomes into financial language, enabling comparison across assets, portfolios, and geographies.

When derived transparently from authoritative public data, they provide a defensible, auditable baseline. But the most mature measurement approaches do not stop there.

CBRE Investment Management’s affordable housing fund, for example, blends quantitative metrics with tenant testimonials, satisfaction surveys, and qualitative assessments of what changed in residents’ lives.

Brent Cross Town’s Flourishing Index uses longitudinal surveys, behavioural observation, and in-person interviews alongside sensor data.

These are not soft alternatives to measurement. They are evidence of outcomes: what actually happened to people, verified through direct engagement with the communities and individuals affected.

The strongest measurement frameworks combine both approaches: quantified, monetised metrics for portfolio-level comparison and financial reporting, and qualitative evidence (beneficiary surveys, case studies, outcome verification) for demonstrating that the numbers reflect reality.

The ability to follow up with beneficiaries, track outcomes over time, and validate data through built-in verification processes is what separates credible reporting from an exercise in spreadsheet modelling.

Beyond the numbers: what else to look for in a framework

Besides the metrics they offer, measurement frameworks vary significantly in how they handle three critical factors.

• Additionality: would this outcome have happened regardless of your intervention? Some frameworks default to attributing 100% of a social outcome to the reporting organisation. Others embed proportional additionality into their methodology, producing more conservative but more defensible figures.
• Proxy value transparency: can the financial values assigned to social outcomes be independently verified? Some frameworks use proprietary multipliers that cannot be replicated without platform access. Others trace every proxy value to publicly accessible data following best-practice principles.
• Governance: is the methodology controlled solely by its commercial provider, or governed by an independent body with no financial incentive to inflate results?

For an investment committee accustomed to auditable financial reporting, these distinctions are decisive. A social impact figure that cannot be independently verified is not an investable metric. It is a marketing claim.

The risk of “social value washing” sits here too.

This is the social equivalent of greenwashing: organisations making misleading or unsubstantiated claims about their social impact. As disclosure requirements tighten under SFDR, CSRD, and related regimes, figures that do not survive scrutiny will damage reputations and erode the investor confidence that social impact reporting is supposed to build.

Before choosing a measurement approach, any real assets firm should seek to answer these seven questions:

• Are proxy values traceable to publicly accessible, authoritative data (ONS, DWP, DfE, NHS), or are they derived from proprietary multipliers that cannot be independently verified?
• Does the methodology account for additionality and deadweight by default, or does it leave this to user discretion, risking overclaiming?
• Is the framework governed by an independent body, or controlled solely by its commercial provider?
• Does it support real assets’ specific needs: asset-level, portfolio-level, and fund-level views across the full lifecycle?
• Does it include place-based metrics covering design, planning, and in-use stages?
• Can it report consistently across international markets, or is it limited to single-country measurement?
• How is data validated and assured? Does the platform include built-in verification processes, or does it rely solely on self-reported data?

These are not trick questions designed to favour one provider. They are the questions that separate investable metrics from figures that will unravel under audit.

From Cost Centre to Competitive Advantage

The firms that treat social impact as an investment, with proper measurement, target-setting, and reporting, are already gaining a competitive advantage over those that treat it as a compliance cost or a CSR afterthought.

• Credible social impact data strengthens SFDR, SDR and CSRD disclosures, supports GRESB submissions, and provides the kind of evidence that investment committees need to allocate capital with confidence rather than faith.
• Quantified social impact at the individual asset level enables benchmarking across portfolios, identification of high-performing assets, and data-driven decisions about where to invest for maximum impact and return. It also drives consistency: when every asset in a portfolio reports against the same framework and metrics, the variation in practice between different teams, regions, and asset classes that many organisations struggle with starts to resolve itself. Place-based metrics for design, planning, and in-use stages make this work at greater granularity: not a single number for a portfolio, but actionable data for each asset across the stakeholders in its specific community context.
• Combining quantified metrics with qualitative evidence (beneficiary surveys, outcome tracking, validated case studies) gives reporting the depth and credibility to serve multiple audiences from a single source: the analyst who wants comparable portfolio data, the board member who wants to understand what actually changed in a community, the investor that wants disclosure-grade figures, the supplier or occupier that wants to see and contribute to the story, and the local community that wants evidence the promises made at planning have been kept. For the small social value or ESG team that typically owns this work across a real estate firm, one credible data layer serving all of those audiences — rather than hand-built versions of the same story for each — is the difference between a sustainable function and one that runs on heroics.
• For ESG and sustainability leads, the ROI narrative is the strongest tool available for securing board-level commitment and budget. When social impact data can be presented with the same rigour and transparency as financial or environmental data, it stops being a nice-to-have line item and becomes part of how the organisation makes investment decisions.
• Purpose-built measurement platforms also address the practical problem of speed and capacity: most social value functions in real estate are small relative to the regulatory and reporting demand placed on them, and the right infrastructure acts as a force multiplier. Auditable, portfolio-level figures become available on demand, without the manual compilation exercise that many teams endure every time a board member, investor, or auditor asks for social impact data — and the team’s time can shift from data wrangling to the strategic and engagement work that actually moves performance forward.

Where Social Impact For Real Assets Is Heading

Social impact in real assets is following the same trajectory that environmental sustainability followed a decade ago: from a reputational concern, to a reporting obligation, to an investable metric.

The organisations building measurement infrastructure now, choosing frameworks that produce transparent, auditable, internationally consistent figures alongside genuine evidence of outcomes, will be the ones best positioned as disclosure requirements tighten and investor expectations continue to rise.

Thrive’s real assets platform, including the Social Scorecard and the Impact Evaluation Standard, is built for exactly this: helping organisations measure, benchmark, and evidence social impact across portfolios, funds, and geographies, combining monetised metrics with beneficiary surveys, outcome verification, and built-in data validation.

Cleo Folkes and the specialist real assets advisory team work with investors and asset managers to build measurement approaches that are rigorous enough for a board paper, practical enough for day-to-day asset management, and rich enough to tell the story of what actually changed.

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