Real Estate Switzerland (RE-CH) has participated in GRESB benchmarking since 2015, this year for the first time with all its eight Swiss UBS real estate investment products. GRESB (Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark) is a real estate-specific, global sustainability platform that reviews and compares annual ESG performance (environmental, social, governance) of real estate vehicles. When the defined minimum standards are reached, the participants are awarded one to five stars (Green Stars). On September 6, 2017 the winners of this year's GRESB awards were announced and all eight participating Swiss real estate investment products have received awards.
Urs Fäs, Head of Investment Products at RE-CH, is thrilled with the awards: “The results of this year’s GRESB assessment come not only as a reward for the performance of our real estate investment products, but also as a validation of our sustainability strategy, which was defined five years ago and has since been progressively implemented. We feel encouraged to continue on our chosen path and work towards further optimising our combination of ecological, social and economic aspects in a client-focused and market-oriented way.” As a further step, we will publish an additional report with the annual financial statements as of June 30, 2017 on the basis of the GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) standard in order to provide further transparency about our activities and progress in the context of ESG.
Awards
Sustainability at RE-CH
The sustainability strategy of RE-CH takes into account ecological, economic and social factors. Among other things, this means that striving to achieve ecological goals must not preclude the attainment of (minimum) economic requirements. Our understanding of sustainability is based on the idea that investment in energy optimisation must be profitable in the medium to long term; for example, through additional revenues and/or cost reductions.
For more information about sustainability at RE-CH, please visit our homepage.
