Retail real estate companies seeking investors should pay heed to their, environmental, social and governance data, according to speakers on a recent ICSC Connect Virtual Series episode called How ESG Data Drives Business Risk and Opportunity. Socially conscious investors now screen investments using these standards on stewardship of nature; employees, supplier, customer and community relationships; executive pay, audits, internal controls and shareholder rights.
“ESG is going to impact your value — and whether that’s your stock value, your property value, the tenants you’re able to attract or the customers you’re able to draw,” said BlackRock managing director and senior product specialist Sherry Rexroad.
Measuring and sharing ESG data boosts the bottom line, said Matt Ellis, founder and CEO of sustainability measurement software firm Measurabl. “We’re giving ourselves new levers to create value, and that is a powerful thing,” he said. The more tools we have at our disposal to create value and capture value, the better off our investors and customers will be.”
Accurate, well-documented ESG data can make a property more sellable and marketable than the competition, said Neil Pegram, Americas director for GRESB, which stands for Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark. “Every building out there, whether it’s a shopping center or not, is usually in some type of fund, and some investor is looking at it. The more shocks we’re getting, whether they’re social ones or pandemics or climate change, the more investors are going to want nonfinancial data, the more they’re going to want accurate ESG data.”
Experts say COVID-19 will accelerate the transition to uniform measurements. “We’re asking the financial system to do something it’s never been designed to do,” said Moody’s Risk Assessments vice president Anna Zubets-Anderson. “It’s a whole movement from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism. “For all these decades, they’ve measured profit, and now we’re asking the financial system to measure something that’s much softer. It’s a very important process for society to figure out what is important to us and what we want to measure and how we measure it.”
The full ICSC Connect Virtual Series episode is available here.
Click to read about and listen to other recent Virtual Series episodes from ICSC
Retailers will have to rethink store portfolios in the new age of remote work
Retail is lagging other property types in attracting investors
Brixmor CEO Jim Taylor: Landlords need federal help keeping tenants open
What health-and-wellness retail will look like after the pandemic
By Brannon Boswell
Executive Editor, Commerce + Communities Today
