For several years I had a front-row seat to the conversations that shaped where GRESB is headed. So when the 2028 GRESB Real Estate Standards were released, I read them less as a surprise and more as the arrival of something the market has been told was coming for a long time.
That is worth saying up front, because it is easy to overlook. GRESB has been forecasting its “Road to Performance” clearly and consistently. Roadmaps, public consultations, webinars, roundtables and scoring insight reports have all pointed in the same direction. In this regard, GRESB has done a very good job of telling the market what it intends to do before it does it. Nobody who has been paying attention over the past 18 months should be caught off guard.
What the market may be underestimating is the impact on submitters' approach to reporting.
From intentions to impact
For most of its history, the GRESB score has rewarded good management. Policies, governance structures, risk assessments, targets and stakeholder engagement all earned points, and rightly so. Those practices allowed the industry to start measuring and reporting sustainability in a consistent way.
But investors have been asking a simple question for years: is a portfolio actually performing better, and how does that tie back to financial returns?
As a growing share of GRESB scores clustered at the top of the range, heavily influenced by management practices, it became harder to tell which portfolios were actually improving performance.
The 2028 Standards are a thoughtful response to those questions. They move the weight of the score away from what organizations say they do and toward what their buildings actually do.
A bold first step on energy and GHG
Out of 100 points, the weight tied to energy and GHG is moving from 6.5 points to as many as 30 points. It is a structural shift in what a GRESB score represents, and it sends an unmistakable signal.
Management becomes the price of entry
The second change is also significant. Several indicators from what was formerly known as the Management Component will no longer contribute to the score. Instead, they become a prerequisite: something you must have in place to receive a GRESB rating at all, but not something that earns points.
I think this is the right call. Good governance and policies matter. But now they are the baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.
What this means for existing submitters
Many existing GRESB submitters have relied on their management practices for upwards of 30% of their total score. Beginning with the 2028 submission, you should expect that portion of the score to be replaced by building-level data.
There are several other important details in the new Standards, and every participant should take the time to understand them fully. But from my seat, this swap is the single most direct way GRESB is addressing the shift in the market.
Points that used to reward well-written policies will now reward measured, verifiable asset performance.
Key takeaway: Your building data handling process now has a much bigger impact on your score
This is the part I would encourage every sustainability and asset management team to think hard about.
When energy and GHG data were worth a handful of points, an imperfect data process was an inconvenience. A missing meter, a manual adjustment or a figure cut and pasted from one spreadsheet into another might cost you a fraction of a point. When that same data drives close to a third of your score, those small errors carry real weight.
Over the coming months, I expect firms to take a hard look at how they handle building-level data internally. Many will discover that their processes still lean heavily on:
Manual exports and copy-and-paste between spreadsheets
Hand-calculated adjustments for floor area, vacancy or estimation
Knowledge held by one or two people who know which file is the right file
Data reconciled once a year, right before the submission deadline
None of these were ever ideal. Under the 2028 Standards, they become a meaningful risk to the overall score and rating. The organizations that perform well will be the ones that treat building data as a continuous, auditable process rather than an annual reporting exercise.
The road ahead
Data from the 2027 reporting year is what will be assessed under the 2028 Standards. For many portfolios, that means the clock is already running.
My advice is simple:
Read the new Standards closely.
Consider what your score would look like if management points disappeared tomorrow. GRESB has indicated it will provide tools to help submitters preview how their data will score under the 2028 Standards, which will be a very helpful starting point.
Take a long, honest inventory of how your building-level data currently moves from the meter to the submission.
GRESB has done its part by telling the market clearly where it is going. Now it is up to the market to follow through, and to prove that the performance behind the scores is real.
About the author
Tom Idzal is Chief Growth Officer at Abisko, a building performance intelligence platform for commercial real estate organizations. Before joining Abisko, he spent four years as Head of Americas at GRESB. Tom has more than 25 years of experience at the intersection of data, analytics and investor reporting.