The central ESG platform for decarbonising our properties
Under our sustainability strategy “Sustainable together. For good reason.”, we at Deka Immobilien are taking on the challenge of being climate-neutral by 2050. A digital Sustainability Management System – SMS for short – is our central management tool for achieving this goal. All data on ESG and the decarbonisation of our portfolio can thus be continuously integrated into our decision-making process in asset and fund management.
Digitalisation for more sustainability
The real estate industry is making increasing use of digitalisation to make an active contribution to the European Green Deal. Energy efficiency and CO2 emission reductions are increasingly being managed centrally and made public via standardised reporting.
The sustainable transformation of the global building portfolio considerably expands a real estate manager’s traditional range of activities. Our central ESG platform creates transparency and helps achieve the necessary scaling to decarbonise our global real estate portfolio through digital, data-based decision-making processes.
Johannes HermannsManaging Director Real Estate Management
With a real estate portfolio of the size and geographical distribution that Deka Immobilien manages on a fiduciary basis for its investors, this requires not only the necessary expertise in real estate and sustainability, but also the ability to use the necessary data in an agile manner at all times and to integrate it into decision-making processes. This is where numerous proptechs in the real estate industry come in. Many have developed digitalisation solutions that enable the central recording of data as well as modelling and calculations through to the visualisation of sustainability indicators.
Formulated objectives
High visualisation quality and user-friendliness
Scenario and action planning with regard to decarbonisation and energy efficiency
Support for reporting requirements for European regulations
Standardised data access for all parties involved
Digital interfaces to data acquisition systems in buildings
Possibility of linking data and documents
Taking into account the formulated objectives and a comprehensive tendering process, the Deka Sustainability Management System (SMS) is being implemented together with BuildingMinds, one of the leading proptech companies in data management.
What if we had a platform that bundles all sustainability-relevant data and documents so that we can efficiently create transparency and make data-based decisions at any time along the entire process chain from property manager to fund management? Together with BuildingMinds, we have risen to this challenge and created a comprehensive solution for our global portfolio.
Peter StahlReal Estate Project Manager
Single source of truth – data as the key to sustainability
To help all users get started smoothly with the SMS, the main focus when setting up the system is on initially filling it based on existing data and information from other Deka systems. This allows users to experience information already collected in previous years directly in the new environment. To accompany this, a comprehensive training programme was developed for all internal and external users. This includes general explanations as well as user-specific in-depth training courses.
Building on this basic framework, the data and information in the SMS are continuously checked for plausibility and gradually supplemented with further sustainability information. The contents of the SMS become our “single source of truth” for sustainable real estate management.
Essentially, the analysable information consists of:
Basic information for each building and portfolio
Building-specific technical characteristics
Information on existing green building certificates and energy performance certificates
Energy consumption data and CO2 emissions of the properties
Provision of documents for energy performance certificates, green building certificates, and other expert reports.
The evaluation of the entered information currently enables the following key elements to be analysed at the building and portfolio level:
Visualisation and comparison of energy consumption and CO2 emissions
Evaluation of existing data quality (measured values, projections, estimates) across the portfolio
Stranding risk analysis using the Carbon Risk Real Estate Monitor (CRREM)
Basis for reporting in accordance with the EU Disclosure Regulation and EU Taxonomy
Data silos and isolated solutions in ESG are increasingly becoming obsolete.
To further improve the flow of data into the system and the associated quality and granularity over time, the collection and quality assurance of data are of critical importance. In the past, a great deal of data in the real estate management process was still collected via individual queries to property managers all over the world, but the SMS is already connected to a continuous flow of data for large parts of the European portfolio via the digital data collector from Deka BAS Cloud. For the connected buildings, it is no longer necessary to regularly request data from real estate management. Instead, real estate managers are given the direct opportunity to utilise the automated data flowing into the SMS to proactively manage the buildings. In future, this digitalised recording process will be applied to the entire global portfolio and gradually expanded.
The Deka SMS supplies the central SAP reporting platform and thus enables a holistic view of the portfolio with all building and consumption data. In order to manage real estate (portfolios) sustainably, there is no way around bringing together the multitude of data sources and systems onto a single platform. The SMS makes a significant contribution to this.
A clear roadmap for decarbonisation
In order to integrate decarbonisation into our central decision-making processes, our ESG data platform helps us to incorporate sustainability indicators and the expected future correlation in addition to traditional commercial parameters such as rental income, real estate value, or fund returns. The platform enables us to carry out scenario analyses for buildings and entire portfolios and assess their impact on, for example, energy consumption, the carbon footprint, and the stranding point. Possible buying and selling scenarios can also be analysed in this way. A data pool on sustainability indicators thus becomes a tool for active portfolio management.
In addition to the standardised indicators currently used on the market for ESG reporting, the SMS also offers scope for incorporating expected future metrics into considerations. For example, it will be possible to visualise and understand potential country-specific CO2 taxes and their impact on investment decisions.
