The ESG Programme That’s Accelerating The Pace Of Change For Office Tenants

Brookfield Properties faced a challenge: how to engage tenants across more than 5M SF of real estate across its UK portfolio in an effort to drive significant improvements across environmental, social and governance practices. Brookfield Properties not only aimed to meet its own target of halving its carbon emissions by 2030, but it also sought to revitalise office spaces and foster a strong sense of community in the postpandemic office landscape.

The result of several years of preparation is AccelerateESG, Brookfield Properties’ wide-reaching ESG programme. Its goal is simple: speed up the pace of change through collaboration. 

“For us, the initial driver was to deliver against our own targets, but by providing more support around ESG to our tenants, we’ve built better relationships, engaging and retaining organisations, and facilitating positive improvements in collaboration with our tenants,” Brookfield Properties Director of Sustainability Conor Storkey said. “We’ve taken the lead and now we’re jointly reaping the rewards.” 

AccelerateESG brings in all aspects of ESG, from the environmental performance of its buildings to supporting business communities. Within the programme, Brookfield Properties has mapped the journey for its assets and invested heavily in communicating with tenants. It forms part of three occupier services alongside its tenant engagement programme Activated and tenant app Axiis. 

The aim is to involve tenants as much as they want, Brookfield Head of Leasing Martin Wallace said. Some tenants are content to take a landlord’s lead on sustainability, while others want to be an active part of the journey to decarbonisation. 

“For existing tenants, we can show them that we have a plan in place for their building as part of our drive to meet science-based targets,” he said. “If they come to renewal, they’ll know they’re not going to just sign a 10-year lease, and the building will stay the same. Incoming tenants see they can engage with us as much or as little as they want, which is a differentiator.”

AccelerateESG has three stages that form a continuous loop: track, when data about building performance is collected; connect, when ideas are shared between landlord and tenants; and deliver, when plans are put in place to reach goals. Brookfield Properties has invested in innovative approaches to data collection and the technology needed to share this information with tenants.

Tenants have particularly welcomed the level of insight Brookfield Properties is now able to provide on their building usage, Storkey said. He gave the example of waste: the team can now tell tenants on a granular level about their waste streams, that a certain department produced more plastic this week, for example.

“We’ve had this data for some time, but the big shift has been getting this to our tenants, which has taken significant investment,” he said. “It’s still evolving. We don’t want to overload them, and different tenants have different priorities, but we’re looking at how we can bring in more data points to give tenants the level of detail they’re asking for.”

Tenants have also welcomed the opportunity to learn from each other, Storkey said. Each occupier is at a different stage of their ESG journey, some having embedded it into practices already while others are at the stage of setting targets. 

To facilitate collaboration, Brookfield Properties holds forums with tenants across its properties as part of AccelerateESG. 

“This is how we can facilitate moving everyone along at a faster pace,” Storkey said. “A large company might employ one or two sustainability professionals, who lack a network of people to learn from. We bring together industry leaders facing similar challenges. You can see everyone light up with excitement.”

As well as educating tenants on its own building strategies and wider environmental best practices, Brookfield Properties events are a key part of its drive to build communities. Boosting social interaction and wellness is a priority for many tenants, and education around climate change and sustainability is a key component of this. 

Occupants have access to events in any Brookfield building, so a person who works at 30 Fenchurch Street can attend a yoga class at 100 Bishopsgate. As a result, Brookfield’s tenants have more engaged employees, Wallace said. 

“We’ve built relationships with tenants, so communicating with staff working in our buildings via an app is a natural step,” Wallace said. “A few years ago, we would only speak to a CEO or head of facilities, but now that we have direct contact with staff, we can run programmes and events we know people want. We find employers are grateful for this contact.”

AccelerateESG has been welcomed by tenants across Brookfield Properties portfolio, Storkey said. This success is partly down to preparation before the programme was launched. 

A couple of years before Brookfield Properties launched AccelerateESG, work began to engage its own employees. In 2023, the team delivered almost 800 hours of ESG training across the company. 

“We had to make sure our team could talk about ESG with confidence,” Storkey said. “Most know a lot of it, but there are so many acronyms. From a relatively small team, we’ve essentially created a large team of ESG professionals across the company.”

This level of engagement has been pivotal in creating strategies for each building in line with how ESG conversations are moving, Wallace said. Some tenants have stated they would prefer to occupy a refurbished building rather than a new building as awareness of embodied carbon has increased. 

The ongoing refurbishment of 30 Fenchurch Street in London is an example of what can be done when a tenant and landlord collaborate, Wallace said. Brookfield Properties is undertaking a full electrification of the 545K SF building, replacing gas boilers with air-source heat pumps while the building remains fully occupied. 

The success of this project exemplifies the overriding aim of AccelerateESG, Storkey said: to speed up the built environment's journey toward net zero, a goal that all landlords and tenants share. 

“Whenever I talk to existing tenants, I can tell ESG is a live conversation in their organisations no matter how far they are on the journey,” he said. “That’s why this programme has landed at the perfect time to give guidance and support. Because we’ve been building this for years, we’ve created a network of partners and suppliers that can help us and our tenants move forward.”

This article was produced in collaboration between Brookfield Properties and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

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