Sustainability Benchmarking
Jones Lang LaSalle’s Upstream Sustainability Services established its confidential service to annually benchmark the sustainability of real estate assets – based on actually achieved operational performance – in 2001. Since then there have been over 2,000 surveys, with over 650 properties (359 offices and 305 managed retail/leisure properties) from nine countries having been benchmarked. To further enable cross-border benchmarking, our online benchmarking platform has been internationalised (with four European language versions already available).

Owners and occupiers of property benefit from Jones Lang LaSalle’s focus on strategies and actions for improvement – the purpose of the benchmarking service is not to obtain a one-off badge / certificate for just a few buildings (often based on predicted performance) – rather the benchmarking service is a management process used to actively improve real performance across whole portfolios year on year.

Indicators to assess sustainability impacts
In collaboration with participants, robust methodologies have been developed to make quantitative assessments and comparisons, at both the property and portfolio levels, of:

• Energy efficiency and carbon footprint
• Waste production and recycling (as well as landfill aversion)
• Water efficiency
• Transport (e.g. car dependency and bicycle parking provision)
• Socio-economic performance such as: community giving, customer and tenant satisfaction, health and safety, sustainable procurement etc

Sustainability Benchmarking Drives Real Operational Performance Improvements
Leading property companies and investors (such as Sonae Sierra and British Land) are already contributing and benefiting from industry peer benchmarking.

From 2006 to 2008, the following collective results have been achieved, on aggregate, by the survey participants:

• 12.9% reduction for shopping centres and 13.2% for offices in energy (as CO2) per square metre of floor area.
• Increasing the proportion of total waste averted from direct-to-landfill by 50% (from 44,000 to 67,000 tonnes) at shopping centres and 13% at offices.
• 1.5% reduction for shopping centres and 7.7% for offices in water consumption per person (per visit for retail properties, per worker in offices).

Benefits of sustainability benchmarking

• Reduce operational costs
• Help develop your sustainability strategy by understanding performance and positioning relative to peers
• Compare sustainable building design with in-use performance
• Cost effective data gathering for sustainability reporting (e.g. GRI, Carbon Disclosure Project, CSR Reporting, Carbon Reduction Commitment)

  Visit our other Sustainability Services pages

“Upstream’s performance benchmarking tool led the industry in establishing a baseline from which improvements can now be measured. This foresight and innovation is critical in driving our business to anticipate the changes coming on this fast moving agenda.”
Paul Edwards, Head of Sustainability, Hammerson

For more information contact:

Matthew Tippett
Director, Sustainability Benchmarking
+44 (0)207 399 5655
matthew.tippett@eu.jll.com