ESG consultancy LifeProven is set to launch a metric this week that measures the social impact of properties, with a mandate from build-to-rent operator Vervlife.
The instruction covers Vervlife’s 1,500-home portfolio.
The consultancy said the metric would provide the BTR operator – and other clients including Dandi Living, Vinci and SEGRO – with data-driven insight on how buildings can be designed and operated to maximise the wellbeing of occupants.
It seeks to mitigate the risk of mental and physical health issues for residents and occupiers, as well as capture evidence companies can use to improve and report on buildings. Each property will be reviewed and updated every six months.
The company has collected 165,000 data points to date across clients such as Dandi Living, Urban Splash and BlackRock, covering occupant variables such as age, gender, income, fitness, nutrition and mental health as well as the type, location, features and operation of properties.
LifeProven said it hoped its metric would become “a new industry standard”.
Adam Hinds, co-owner of Lifeproven, said: “Being able to demonstrate a building’s exact impact on wellbeing – through data – is going to be central to the future of investment.
“Covid has… seen more and more operators recognise that buildings that have responded best are those that have performed well from a wellbeing standpoint, even if they didn’t know exactly how.
“Now clients, engineers and architects – who actively want the better brief that our data affords – are talking about building wellbeing. The big difference will be their ability to say ‘this building performs better than that one for wellbeing, and we understand why’, right down to being able to give a hierarchy as to why, say, putting bigger windows into a particular building is more important than the size of the property.”
Hinds added: “With mental health firmly on the national agenda, and with people spending 95% of their time indoors, thinking of the building process anew, as a means of preventing potential poor health, is clearly a progressive idea.
“By considering the likes of natural light, air quality, acoustics, thermal characteristics, privacy, but also opportunities to socialise and the like is all relatively new compared to, for example, carbon emissions. So, equally, is recognising that bad-quality buildings can have a negative impact on quality of life, especially over a period of time.”
Jordan Relfe, co-founder of LifeProven, said: “Wellbeing is highly personalised, not a generic metric, and property operators typically haven’t known where to start with addressing it.
“Sustainability is more widely understood. but I think the market has been much slower in considering wellbeing as central to a building’s performance. Perhaps Covid has changed that for the better. Either way, we have set out to make it as easy to measure a building for its wellbeing as one might for its carbon footprint.”
Relfe added: “Environmentally, buildings will get to where they need to be. But, on reflection, one can consider wellbeing as being in many respects more important – not just because it is a huge growth area but because it’s really about making buildings better for the people in them, and, really, it’s remarkable that this hasn’t been scientifically assessed by the industry before. It is the future of property.”
Brent Stojanovic, director at launch partner VervLife, said that since environmental standards are being pushed through by legislation, measuring occupier wellbeing will set its properties apart from the rest of the market.
Stojanovic said: “At VervLife we feel strongly about doing our bit as operators to improve the physical and mental health of our residents and members. This sector-leading partnership with the team at LifeProven will give us unique, science-backed and granular insight into the wellbeing of the people that live in our managed communities and the factors that affect it.
“With this knowledge we can make smarter decisions on how our buildings are run, providing our investor clients with valuable data on how their assets are performing from a health and wellbeing perspective.”
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