GBCI Acquires Sustainable Real Estate Benchmark GRESB

If you think of the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) at all, you probably think of it as the organization that administers your LEED credential and reviews your LEED project for certification. What is it doing acquiring the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB), a system that scores real estate portfolios—with or without reference to LEED?

You can call it “grez-bee” or “gresb”—your choice, according to Chris Pyke, Ph.D., vice president for research at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), GBCI’s sister organization—but either way, Pyke says that over a decade of work, “econometric” researchers have demonstrated that “green building as individual buildings and [grouped] as entire funds outperform their peers in the real estate investment world.”  Therefore, “knowing what makes a portfolio green and differentiating good, better, best, is material to the investment process” (see New Index Could Bring New Investors to Green Building).