Time to get switched on to sustainability

In the current economic climate, no-one wants to waste money, and the priority for most businesses is making sure they’re still around, and in a reasonably healthy state, whenever the recovery comes.

Nowhere is this more true than in the land and property field, where the usual time frame for investment decisions is one of decades rather than months or years. So there’s a powerful argument that this is a good time for those within the sector whose job it is to promote ideas of sustainability.

“My thinking is that sustainability is all about opportunities to help businesses save money and to get things in the right shape for when the economy picks up,” explains Arlette Anderson, head of sustainability at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), a post created at the end of last year.

Related articles

• Surveyors on set: it's not all about the property market
• Peter Goodacre: 'Surveyors need to understand the relationship between money and property'
• Search the news archive for more stories

She’s set herself the task of creating, within RICS, a centre of excellence on sustainability issues, which will support surveyors in all fields to help advise their clients, whether in building new developments or managing existing ones.

So how does she define the term at the heart of her job title?

“I’m balancing economic, environmental and social objectives on a global, national and local level for land, property and construction,” she says.

“And you have to look at the whole property life cycle, from the planning and procurement (building) stage, to occupation, possible refurbishment and then the end of life issues of demolition and remediation (bringing the land back to its original condition).”

Most big firms operating within the land and property business now employ a senior figure whose responsibility is to ensure sustainability issues assume prominence at every stage of a building’s life.

One such firm is the international property consultancy, Drivers Jonas, which employs over 750 people, the majority of whom are surveyors. Head of sustainability, Jon Lovell, says that, although sustainability has been a dedicated function of the business for the last decade, it’s only in the last couple of years that the market demand from clients has warranted a co-ordinated approach across the business. In the words of the firm’s website, “sustainability now cuts across every surveying and planning discipline”.

One example is when Drivers Jonas surveyors lead project management teams on large capital programmes, such as colleges, hospitals of offices.

“Increasingly that role incorporates ensuring that the wider design team are held to account against a sustainability framework,” explains Lovell. “For example, optimising energy performance of buildings by thermal efficiency and air tightness.”

And in the traditional surveying role of valuation, buildings that compare unfavourably on grounds of sustainability are now considered to depreciate more quickly and become obsolete earlier.

“We are finalising a matrix tool that surveyors will use to make these judgements, which will refer to a number of credentials, such as energy rating, water efficiency, waste generation, flood risk, and connectivity to transport routes,” says Lovell.

And on the policy side, Drivers Jonas surveyors are also engaged in advising the Government on the long-term resilience of towns and cities. This brings in, among other things, the degree and speed with which existing and proposed environmental legislation, at national and European level, will force developers and property owners to abide by certain standards.

Inevitably, debates of this nature will include an element of uncertainty and predictions of how public and political opinion will develop in the future.

This is the area inhabited by Charles Woollam, chartered surveyor and director of the global property advisor, DTZ. For two decades he’s been advising property owners as they ponder investment decisions, but only recently has that advice been significantly coloured by sustainability issues.

“In the last two years sustainability has become a major topic in the property industry, and there’s now a major expectation that sustainability will come to have an impact on value.”

The difficulty for Woollam and his colleagues around the sector, though, is that this impact on value has not happened yet. Moreover no one knows when, and by how much, it will kick in.

“This makes it difficult for property owners to make decisions,” he explains, “because big sums are involved in improving existing stock to conform with sustainability standards, but we don’t yet know what sort of returns they can expect in the future.”

The skill which he brings to the table is to assess, on a case by case basis, the degree to which sustainability factors will influence how the quality of a property is judged. But he is sure that, gradually, this influence will increase.

He cites the example of location, traditionally the most prominent driver of valuation. “What constitutes a good location will be affected by sustainability arguments,” he explains, a reference, among other things, to the growing insistence of planning authorities that new commercial buildings can be accessed exclusively by public transport.

And here, changing public attitudes may also become powerful factors. Domestic tenants, potential employees and businesses, are likely to shape their decisions around how sustainable –on ecological, economical or even ethical grounds – they consider a building or location to be. A recent survey by the law firm Taylor Wessing found evidence that commercial tenants are already willing to pay higher rents for buildings with high sustainability credentials.

Surveyors have to be as alive to these shifting sands as they do to the more concrete and regulatory obligations. Because, ultimately, the human factor can never be ignored when gauging the value of something.

Putting sustainability into practice

Sophie Walker, 29, is a senior consultant at Upstream Sustainability Services (part of the international property management firm, Jones Lang LaSalle). She took a Masters in environmental management for business at Cranfield University.

“I decided to apply for my job because of a longstanding interest in environmental change.

"A classic example of my work would be being brought in to assess a company that already has some excellent practices - in that they see the link between sustainability and value - but wants me to see what they are doing well and what they are not doing so well.

"So, for example, I might find good practice as far as lighting is concerned - getting people to turn off lights when they leave and installing movement sensitive lights. But the company might not have thought about their IT. So we might come in and think about their data centre and ask about the efficiency of the air conditioning of the server, and suggest a more efficient chilling system. This is because energy for IT is a large part of costs and focusing just on lighting won’t save you much.

"Another example might be advising the operators of a retail park on a better waste storage system.

"We also try to practise what we preach, so try to travel as little as possible ourselves, and when at all possible, I always travel by train.”