A clear overview of sustainability goals with CRREM and SBTi

Before making choices, you need to know where you stand. Two international frameworks focused on real estate form the backbone of your analysis:

• Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi): SBTi is a framework that helps companies translate the climate ambitions from the Paris Climate Agreement into concrete targets for your real estate portfolio. These targets align your investments with a maximum warming of 1.5°C.
• CRREM benchmarks: CRREM (Carbon Risk Real Estate Monitor) is a tool that provides concrete reference values and guidelines for CO2 reduction for real estate by building type and region. This allows strategic decisions to be made regarding necessary investments and sustainability. You compare your current and projected emissions with the required reduction curve, so you can see exactly which buildings are at risk of lagging performance. CRREM helps identify risks and make strategic decisions to meet SBTi's goals.

These frameworks help gain insight on the property and allow the impact of necessary actions to achieve carbon neutral buildings.  

Your real estate portfolio towards carbon neutrality in 4 steps

To meet the 2050 goals, now is the time to act to steer the real estate portfolio toward carbon neutrality. Ingenium offers a fully guided process where we can assist you from strategy to implementation:

1. Data analysis and strategic assessment.

We start with a quick data scan of your building and strategic analysis of your energy and heat consumption. This gives us a clear overview of the current situation.

2. Investment and business model

Based on the analysis, we develop an investment plan. This includes determining the necessary measures, calculating financial returns and payback periods, and investigating opportunities for subsidies and financing.

3. Phased master plan

With the data collected, we create a phased master plan tailored to the specific needs of your buildings and organization. This plan includes concrete measures such as building envelope optimization, installation of solar panels, installation of heat pumps or connection to a heat grid.

4. Realization and follow-up

In the implementation phase, we take care of drafting the specifications with a description of the modifications, guidance during tendering such as negotiations and verification of the offers, monitoring the quality of a correct implementation with a close follow-up of energy consumption, costs and CO2 reduction during the operation of the building.

Throughout the entire process, we position ourselves as partners in your project. We think along with your vision, help to focus your questions and deliver customized solutions tailored to your organization. This gives you both technical and strategic support.

Customization and additional insights

Using the insights and our customized advice, we answer typical questions that arise in the real estate industry, such as:

• How can we optimize the phasing of sustainability measures to match the investment rhythm of the various buildings within our portfolio?
• What is the expected impact of building envelope renovation and solar panel installation on the energy performance and CRREM position of each building?
• How can we effectively link our internal sustainability goals and ESG strategies to an achievable CRREM pathway for each building?

We not only help answer these questions, but also provide a clear decision-making framework for each building. This enables property managers to make informed choices about where best to intervene first, with what return, and how this fits into the broader portfolio plan.

By combining technical analysis with financial and strategic priorities, we deliver valuable insights that contribute to better investment decisions, reduced risk of value loss and increased confidence among internal and external stakeholders.

We act as an independent partner, creating scenarios and working through them with you, identifying risks together and helping to make investment decisions based on organizational priorities.

Real-time insight with interactive dashboards

Ingenium developed a proprietary CRREM-based analysis tool that is fully customized to your organization's situation.

The added value for you as a customer:

• You can plan multiple retrofit measures simultaneously and see their combined impact over time.
• You get a realistic picture of timing, investment needs and CO2 reductions, including interactions between measures.
• You can easily simulate and adjust scenarios, which helps to make choices quickly and substantiated.

Case examples:

• VDAB gained insight into the combined impact of insulation, ventilation and heat pumps thanks to our analysis. This allowed them to prioritize which measures needed to be implemented immediately and which could follow later.
• City of Bruges was able to use our tool to create a five-year budget for addressing the building envelope of the buildings with the greatest CO2 reduction potential, thereby targeting investment resources.
• The Finance Tower was able to see exactly at what point the building would lose value due to excessive emissions. Thanks to our analysis, timely measures could be planned. Ingenium is now actually implementing some of these proposed interventions.

In short, our advice and guidance helps you not only protect the value of your property, but also achieve your climate goals.

The figure below illustrates that under the CRREM reference scenario, without interventions, the building would be stranded in 2030 due to excessive carbon emissions. By conducting a timely analysis, taking measures and cleverly linking them to planned renovations and relocations, the stranding date can be pushed back to 2037. This gives the owner extra years to invest in phases and preserves the value of the building.