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Driving decarbonisation and celebrating inclusion at UKREIIF 2023

The UK Real Estate Investment & Infrastructure Forum (UKREIIF) kicks off on May 16th, bringing together developers, investors, Government and specialist advisors to discuss our industry’s pressing issues, at Leeds’ Royal Armouries.

The venue is just round the corner from TFT’s Leeds office, and you’ll see the our team out and about throughout the conference, including at two key events:

Towards Net Zero: BPF panel discussion

May 16th, 10am at the JLL Pavilion

TFT helped deliver the British Property Federation’s (BPF) research into one of our industry’s greatest challenges: achieving Net Zero Carbon across the property sector. The BPF has published these findings along with key recommendations for government policy to address them.

This session provides the chance to hear first-hand from those who have shaped the research and recommendations, to ask questions about the findings and what comes next from panellists including TFT, JLL, Greengage and Maples Teesdale.

Book to join the panel discussion here.

Freehold LGBT+: UKREIIF fringe event

May 17th, 6pm at Fibre Bar

We are holding a drinks reception with Freehold at Fibre Bar in aid of Not a Phase, a charity dedicated to uplifting trans+ adults across the UK. We will be joined at the event by Dani St James, CEO of Not a Phase, founder and CEO of lingerie brand Zoah and LGBT+ influencer and content creator. There is also an after party at Viaduct show bar.

Tickets for this event are now sold out. You can join the waiting list here.

Will you be at UKREIIF and want to meet up? Get in touch here and let us know!

Botanic Place, Cambridge

TFT undertook a technical due diligence acquisition report to support our client’s purchase and reinstatement cost assessment for insurance purposes. Botanic Place is a 1.1 hectare site comprising a seven storey office building with additional basement and plant levels. The site also includes four end of life office buildings, a multi storey car park and a locally significant public house in need of repair and refurbishment. Botanic place is located within central Cambridge occupying prime real estate space in the business quarter of the city.

Whilst much of the site is marked for redevelopment under an outline planning application approved prior to the sale. An existing, recently developed building ‘Botanic House’ is located on the site. Botanic House is a fully let office building constructed circa 2014 with a net internal area of 52,280sqft. The redevelopment plans require the refurbishment of the public house whereas the remaining buildings are scheduled for demolition once vacant.

Our client proceeded with the acquisition and acquired the full extent of the site.

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Building data: a missing link between decarbonisation and safety

The construction industry faces increasing pressure to improve the safety of buildings, and energy efficiency to support decarbonisation targets. With legislation now tightening, commercial buildings below an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of ‘E’ cannot be legally let as of April 2023. In the same month, the Building Safety Regulator is implementing the Building Safety Act, requiring all ‘higher-risk buildings’ in England to be registered with them by October 1, 2023.

These obligations put the focus on building owners and developers to work smarter and more effectively to meet them. TFT Partner David Medcraft believes that better use of data will be essential to create and maintain efficient and safe of buildings into the future. In a recent article for Construction News, David highlights the role of building data in breaking down silos between sustainability and building safety, as well as across wider project teams.

Read the full article in Construction News, here.

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Do we have the data to stay ahead of market expectations?

Regulatory compliance isn’t the only concern: market expectations are rapidly outpacing regulation and we predict standards will continue to rise. Accordingly, building owners and occupiers prioritise both safety and decarbonization across their portfolios, but nonetheless are missing valuable opportunities to improve both workstreams while developing, managing, buying, and selling properties.

A industry-wide shortfall in reliable building information threatens these efforts. Information is often gathered piecemeal by project or management teams, and those records are frequently lost or made inaccessible over time due to damage, loss, or data corruption. When the remaining information is handed to building owners or occupiers, there are no guarantees it will be fully understood or used.

Surveys and investigations are necessary to fill in the gaps and supply the right data for safety works and decarbonisation works alike. However, the current status quo means that even recent investigations may need to be repeated on the same asset, as findings are lost over time.

Bridging the gaps between safety and decarbonisation

One of the issues is that stakeholders who work on a building over its lifecycle often operate in silos. That is particularly true when considering the specialised works required for decarbonization versus building safety improvements. However, safety and decarbonisation share many similar data requirements.

The Building Safety Act requires building owners and managers to maintain accurate and up-to-date information on their buildings, including details about construction materials, layouts, and maintenance history. Decarbonisation works also require an understanding of materials, layouts, and maintenance history, in addition to data on energy usage, renewable energy production, and building automation systems.

A Building Information Modelling (BIM) system can collect and manage data to facilitate tracking, visualization, and updates of key characteristics. BIM systems offer a powerful means of maintaining the ‘golden thread,’ which the Hackitt report requires to maintain accessible and accurate building safety information, breaking down silos by allowing crucial information to be added, accessed, and used by all who work or use a building.

Making data input easier and output more useful is essential to achieving this and ultimately easing the ongoing work of improving buildings throughout their lifecycles.

David Medcraft, TFT Partner and Head of Development & Project Consultancy

Bridging the data gap: up to the government or the real estate industry?

There are several systems, platforms, and technologies available to help project teams, building managers, occupiers, and owners to gather and use their buildings’ data. However, all of these are useless if data management is not considered necessary for each stakeholder’s role.

The UK government can go further on data requirements to support its decarbonization targets and implement its Building Safety Act. The real estate industry could lead the way in creating a common standard for data management by co-developing and promoting it. We need to create guidance and resources to enable all professions to work with data models that support their responsibilities.

The industry can better orchestrate its decarbonization and building safety works by using data management. Whether a result of regulation or market-led standard, it is the only way to avoid a vicious cycle of repeated works, uncertainty, expenditure, and stranded assets risks in the future.

Read the full article in Construction News, here.

Decarbonisation and Fire Safety: using the ‘golden thread’ of data

Decarbonisation and fire safety are our industry’s two great challenges. Could the efforts on both fronts be united with better data?

David Medcraft, TFT’s Head of Project and Development Consultancy, highlights the siloed workstreams and lost opportunities faced by those addressing improvement works on buildings of all kinds. He proposes more accessible and complete building data models, to help a wider set of stakeholders report, analyse and manage building performance.

We can reduce risk, duplication and costs, and build more resilient assets for the future by linking our work more effectively.

Is there a decarbonisation and safety data gap?

Regulatory compliance and market expectations drive many building owners and occupiers to place safety and decarbonisation at the top of their priorities, with teams and resources dedicates to staying ahead of the upward curve

However, a chronic lack of building information threatens those efforts […] data is either gathered piecemeal, damaged, or not fully understood by those who need it.

David Medcraft, Construction News 2023

Building a Golden Thread between decarbonisation and fire safety

The Building Safety Act requires owners and managers maintain accurate and up-to-date information including construction materials, layouts and maintenance history. Decarbonisation works also require this data, in addition to aspects like energy usage, renewables production and automation.

Building Information Management (BIM) systems present a powerful means of […] breaking down siloes by allowing crucial information to be added, accessed and used by all who work in or visit a building. Making data input easier, and its output more useful, will be essential to achieve our goals for improving building safety and decarbonisation, and ease the ongoing work of improving buildings through their lifecycles.

David Medcraft, Construction News 2023

Reducing risk and complexity with data

The goal is to facilitate data management, not to add volume of complexity at a time when our industry already faces significant challenges.

The industry can better orchestrate its decarbonisation and building safety works using data management. It’s the only way to avert a vicious cycle of repeated works, uncertainty, expenditure and stranded-asset risks in the years to come.

David Medcraft, Construction News 2023

Read the full article on Construction News, here (£).

TFT joins Irish Green Building Council

TFT is a member of the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC), the Irish branch of the global Green Building Council community of over 80 groups promoting sustainable building around the world.

IGBC is now Ireland’s leading authority on green building best practices with a network of over 300 member organisations with influence across the entire built environment industry.

With this membership, TFT has broadened its long-running partnership with the UK Green Building Council, including work on advancing industry knowledge around:

Though these initiatives remain relevant tools for our industry, Ireland’s policy and regulatory frameworks present different routes to sustainable building in the region than are used in the UK.

The IGBC also leads a number of ground-breaking projects providing proof of concepts and showing the way forward for transformative changes in the Irish property and construction market:

  • Home Performance Index (HPI) certification: a scheme for sustainable housing and planning at local and national levels.
  • Full building Life Cycle Analysis (LCA): IGBC is raising awareness about embodied carbon using an EPD Ireland database to provide a national platform for suppliers and manufacturers to upload their Environmental Product Declaration Certificates. In addition, it is developing a national generic construction database provides a store of Irish building information to be used in early-stage building-level LCA
  • Carbon Design Tool: giving designers a simple way to calculate the carbon impact of their designs.
  • Piloting a Construction Materials Exchange: this scheme demonstrates a user-friendly system for the reuse of construction materials that would otherwise enter the waste stream.

Kevin Brannigan, Head of TFT’s Dublin office, said:

“We know leading building owners and occupants count sustainability as a top priority, but we still find inconsistent understanding of how to achieve these goals or how organisational ambitions are met in different regions.

So partnering with the IGBC is a great way to combine TFT’s understanding of sustainable, valuable and resilient buildings with the IGBC’s leading research, education and industry engagement work. Together I look forward to elevating standards and knowledge across the board.”

Kevin Brannigan, Head of TFT’s Dublin office

Find out more about the IGBC here.

Supriya Kamath

Supriya is a London-based Associate Director leading TFT’s Sustainable Development services. She works as part of Sustainability and Net Zero Carbon Hub.

Supriya’s is passionate about decarbonisation of the Real Estate Industry and enjoys collaborating with TFT Clients to assess their Real estate ESG priorities and identify areas for improvement in achieving their Net Zero, Decarbonisation and Sustainable Development goals.

She is a qualified Architect with a specialism in Sustainable Development in the built environment and Corporate Environmental Strategy. Her expertise focuses on sustainability certifications, planning and wellbeing. She has led and delivered BREEAM Excellent and Outstanding certifications on a number of developments. She has written sustainability statements for complex planning applications for a number of projects to meet the London Plan Sustainability Policy requirements and also worked on a number of WELL and LEED certification projects. She also has expertise in a range of complementary services such as whole life carbon, embodied carbon, circular economy reporting and Environmental management system.

 

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Decarbonisation at MIPIM 2023: rising to the challenge

While we manage our carbon impacts and continually scrutinise the decisions we make in order to reduce them, industry events like MIPIM pose a dilemma. To go or not to go? How do we make attendance worthwhile and create positive impacts from doing so? Our industry’s gathering in Cannes creates huge possibilities for connections and personal discussion which is unrivalled globally. But we want to put progress at the forefront of those conversations. Those connections should be valuable to our goal for tackling decarbonisation with the widest viewpoint, and to contribute more positively in the long term.

Managing Partner Alistair Allison spoke with MIPIM News, to highlight this mission and explain why the goal of decarbonisation is central to our work at TFT. He summarised the conversation for us here:

Will we all leave Cannes with a clearer focus? Specifically, a focus on delivering a resilient and sustainable built environment? I hope so.

Any real estate investor, developer or occupier will know what sustainability looks like today – a huge array of certifications all claiming facets of success. But the harder, less visible work is for our whole industry to align itself with the same priorities: decarbonise our assets by reducing energy use and improving building efficiency. If we can do it, we can deliver short-term benefits like boosting ‘green’ economies and reducing energy costs, while also improving our long-term prospects of achieving Net Zero Carbon.

Our team is part of an industry-wide effort to create a clearer and more consistent approach to the decarbonisation of real estate. We helped deliver the British Property Federation’s ‘Towards Net Zero’ report, finding that 9 in 10 property leaders don’t believe our industry will achieve Net Zero Carbon, and identifying targeted policy areas which could change that outlook.

It’s far from a British issue, and impacts the industry globally. We work with major funds, occupiers and developers globally who are taking the lead with their own ambitious standards. But that leaves a large proportion of our industry left to engage.

We know 80% of the buildings in use by 2050 have already been built. We propose that only widespread, economical and effective retrofit schemes can make those buildings ready for the future. The great barrier to doing so is the investment required.

So I’m encouraged by several examples of policies which nudge retrofit economics in the right direction, and expand their benefits in the process.

In the Netherlands, companies are offered tax reductions equal to 45% of their retrofit investment, to bring costs within a more manageable range. In Italy, there is a 110% ‘superbonus’ tax scheme, for building owners who invest in improving their buildings’ efficiency. Both of these policies cover insulation upgrades, installing technology like heat pumps and solar panels, and replacing old boilers.

But what about the skills required to meet the surge in demand as works become more affordable? In the UK, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority has launched a scheme in conjunction with local education centres, providing sustainable construction skills for all, including installation of renewable technologies.

While we wait for policies like these to become commonplace and raise the standards of the industry not just in the UK but internationally, I hope MIPIM will be a forum for inspiration and action. I look forward to more debate and agreement on best practice and new opportunities for decarbonisation.

With so much to talk about, I will be saying three things clearly to everyone who will listen: we can achieve a more sustainable, resilient built environment. We can make decarbonisation a responsibility for every stakeholder in our industry. We can meet today’s urgent and acute challenges while we do so.

Read the full article in MIPIM News, here.