Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Transforming the Building Industry

We know where we need to go: toward a more equitable and environmentally responsible real estate industry. How to get there—quickly—remains elusive.

If you’re looking for a roadmap, consider the BuildUp 2030 Framework for the Transformation of Real Estate recently released by the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT), a nonprofit that has historically focused on energy policy. This toolkit goes beyond that focus to offer a comprehensive guide designed to “more clearly define what transformation of real estate might look like by 2030 to better protect, support, and nourish the people in buildings and the world around them.”

The framework identifies and elaborates on ten unifying principles for transforming business practices within the next decade:

• Support the strength and growth of local communities, especially communities of color.
• Use supply chains as levers for change to promote fair and equitable access to opportunities while reducing environmental impact.
• Significantly increase diversity internally by recruiting and promoting women and people of color, and compensating them fairly.
• Reduce sector carbon emissions to help limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C.
• Diversify business relationships and partnerships to bring more power and opportunity to businesses that are led by and employ women and people of color.
• Ensure that all buildings and neighborhoods are healthy and safe through active management of health factors for inhabitants and community members.
• Measure, manage, and report relevant ESG metrics and commit to improving these metrics collectively to improve transparency and accountability.
• Creatively finance improvements to buildings to reduce risk and unnecessary or unaligned financial burdens.
• Plan for future natural disasters, like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, through climate risk management and improve the resilience of individual buildings and communities.
• Align all business actions with the values espoused in ESG reports.

Each of the principles comes with a series of actionable ways to implement that principle. For example, to support local communities, building professionals might work on projects that bring essential services to underserved communities. Firm profiles and additional resources round out each section.

Overall, in the authors’ words, the document provides “a foundational framework, a clear and achievable set of action ideas, and an inspiring vision for the future that we can all reach if we work together in a spirit of positive change.”

For more information:

Institute for Market Transformation
imt.org