The Rising Demand for Healthy Buildings
Examining Investor Viewpoints on Health and Wellness
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The Center for Active Design is pleased to share a new report detailing the growth in demand for healthy buildings. A New Investor Consensus: The Rising Demand for Healthy Buildings summarizes a comprehensive health and wellness study of global real estate investment managers and stakeholders representing an aggregate US$5.75 trillion assets under management (AUM) and portfolio investments in real estate totaling approximately US$1.03 trillion. This report was created in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) and BentallGreenOak (BGO).
Findings draw from a quantitative survey as well as qualitative structured interviews designed to gauge investor sentiment on integrating human health into real estate investment decisions and gain insight into future directions for the sector. The report reveals that COVID-19 has elevated the importance of health in investment decision-making, with 89.5 percent of respondents signaling their intent to enhance their wellness-related asset management strategies in the coming year. The need for healthy buildings has been steadily rising over the last decade, with nearly 70 percent of respondents indicating that they were seeing increased demand prior to the pandemic.
The report highlights an increasing investor awareness of the importance of health and well-being to their environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies and the link between building design and function, and personal and societal health and wellness. This has given rise to a more concerted focus on the “S,” or social component of ESG, which has traditionally lagged behind the more well-defined environmental and governance pillars. The findings of this report signal a paradigm shift for the industry that is leading to a fresh evaluation of the role that the built environment plays in the safety, health and wellness of its occupants.
AT-A-GLANCE: Key Findings from the study.
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Report Citation:
Center for Active Design, UNEP FI Secretariat, & BentallGreenOak. (2021). A new investor consensus: The rising demand for healthy buildings. https://www.fitwel.org/new-investor-consensus/