After launching the GRESB Health and Well-being Module as a voluntary, standalone assessment in 2016, GRESB has worked with the Green Health Partnership to integrate aspects of the Module into the 2019 GRESB Real Estate Assessment.
Over the past three years, the Module demonstrated an increasing level of interest in health and well-being among leading real estate companies and funds. Module participation grew from 174 funds in 2016 to 297 funds in 2018, representing a third of GRESB Real Estate participants. The Module has also demonstrated that companies and funds are able to make meaningful improvements to their health promotion efforts within just a few years.
While the GRESB Real Estate Assessment had existing indicators related to aspects of health and safety, the Health & Well-being Module provided an opportunity to test new indicators explicitly focused on the promotion of health and well-being for organizational employees, tenants, and customers. After three years of testing, health and well-being indicators that showed high levels of performance have been moved to the GRESB Real Estate Assessment. GRESB Participants will find a new “Health & Well-being” portion within Stakeholder Engagement with four new health and well-being indicators, two of which are unscored and voluntary in 2019. Additionally, participants are now able to report the presence of health and well-being policies as entity-level policies impacting social issues within the Policy & Disclosure aspect.
In the fall, GRESB participants and investors can expect to see a new health portion of the GRESB Benchmark Report which will communicate how a real estate fund performs across all health-relevant GRESB indicators.
Check out the new health indicators in the 2019 GRESB Real Estate Assessment and stay tuned for the release of a Green Health Partnership & GRESB Health Report this summer which will provide additional insights from the GRESB Health & Well-being Module.