GRESB 2023

New this year from GRESB Real Estate Standards

This year there has been moderate changes to the Real Estate Assessment, but with minimal changes related to the use of Envizi’s platform:

• Changes to how off-site Renewable Energy is being recognized

• Percentage of Asset Ownership now becomes mandatory

• Introducing two new property types: Industrial Distribution Warehouse – Refrigerated and Non-Refrigerated

• New authorization process to allow GRESB Data Partners to connect to GRESB for data submissions

New this year from Envizi

• Updated authorization flow to connect Envizi to your reporting entities in GRESB portal - this must be done for the API to work this year

• Group needs to be explicitly set to ‘Active’ for GRESB data submission via API. The flag’s default value has been changed to ‘Inactive’.

• Re-arrangement of sub menu items under the Group → GRESB sub menu, to facilitate an improved process flow for data capture and API submissions

• Re-arrangement of sub menu items under the Location sub menu - GRESB related menus have been removed from the ‘Benchmark’ sub menu and moved to a standalone GRESB sub menu

• Added support for joint venture assets submission

Getting Started

The first step is to authorize the Envizi application as an ‘external contributor’ for each fund you manage.

Next you should log into Envizi and record the ‘GRESB Entity ID’ in the GRESB Group Settings page, which will provide the link required for Envizi to connect with GRESB. You would also need to explicitly set the Group to be ‘Active’ for GRESB Reporting.

Once the connection is made you can begin creating assets, updating assets, validating, etc…

Best practice is to go through all of the Grid Capture screens to review your data at the group level. Here are instructions for each section and performance indicator:

• GRESB Section - Asset Characteristics (AC)

• GRESB Section - Building Certifications (BC)

• GRESB Section - Efficiency Measures (EM)

• GRESB Section - Reporting Characteristics (RC)

• Performance Indicator Data Sources - Energy

• Performance Indicator Data Sources - GHG

• Performance Indicator Data Sources - Water

• Performance Indicator Data Sources - Waste

Once all the necessary data have been capture and reviewed, you can then use either the GRESB Asset Summary page to submit data to GRESB via API for individual asset, or the GRESB Group Review page to submit data to GRESB in bulk for multiple assets within the same GRESB reporting entity.

GRESB Asset Summary dashboard (with embedded GRESB API connection)

The GRESB Asset Summary dashboard (with API) allows users to interrogate their data down the field level and gain an understanding of how the data being reported to GRESB was summarized. Users can also manage and fix discrepancies in their Envizi data with data that is populated in GRESB. Finally, for new assets, users can create assets on the GRESB portal while on this dashboard.

We’ve also taken advantage of some other great features offered by the API. Users can now validate their data in Envizi at the asset level so you can sense check your data before submitting. This is supported by the ability to disable fields that you don’t want Envizi to manage for GRESB reporting.

GRESB Group Review dashboard (with embedded GRESB API connection)

For users operating at the group level we have the GRESB Group Review (with API) dashboard that informs users of how much Envizi data is matching GRESB data using percentages and a heat map. This will make it very quick for users to determine data health before final submission.

Users can also submit data to GRESB in bulk on this dashboard, or configure disabled fields across a selection of locations, sections or periods within the group.

In addition, ‘Active Parent GRESB Group' and 'Asset Id’ are shown on the dashboard to provide additional informatin for the submission of joint venture assets.