Sustainability programs can directly impact financial performance, from reducing maintenance and utility bills to enhancing a building’s long-term value. Providing direct sightlines into these positive financial impacts can also earn C-suite buy-in for future sustainability initiatives.

The following are key financial metrics to track on the journey to a more sustainable portfolio.

It’s important to evaluate utility bills in aggregate to get a topline, consolidated view of savings. But analysing also at the site level provides a more detailed understanding, including the various utility rate structures and incentives across different markets. For example, some utility providers offer a lower rate for companies that reduce energy use or demand below a certain threshold. Compiling such nuanced details can seem overwhelming for a large portfolio, but today’s data and analytics tools can automate data gathering and produce powerful analytics to glean insights.

To make an airtight business case for up-front investment in a new project, organisations need to determine the total cost of ownership and savings over time. When they replace older building systems with more modernised solutions, building operators not only gain greater control and insight into equipment performance but also reduce maintenance expenses and improve building resiliency—enhancing sustainability. But it can be difficult to assess the true impact of such initiatives, from calculating baseline spending for maintenance repairs to comparing equipment data across a large portfolio—that’s where advanced data and analytics tools can help.

Any major project or equipment investment also needs to be monitored for performance, from renewable energy installations and chiller replacements to building automation system upgrades. But it’s not just about measuring data—it's also about using that data to manage and improve equipment performance.

When a portfolio includes multiple building types in different climate zones and of various uses and sizes, it can be difficult to compare trends in overall energy reductions. Energy reductions can be measured on an absolute basis, but a more meaningful metric is energy reductions normalised for factors such as production, occupancy, and weather.

Evaluating energy usage per square foot can also help demonstrate how one building’s energy consumption measures up to another’s.

Amid pollution and overflowing landfills, this metric quantifies the percentage of waste diverted to composting and recycling programmes, as well as eliminated through waste management programmes.

Simply reducing a building or portfolio’s dependence on fossil fuel is one of the first and most important measures of sustainability. As more organisations commit to net zero carbon initiatives, this is a must-track metric for most real estate teams. It’s challenging enough to track emissions related to your own operations, and now organisations are under pressure to also measure indirect emissions from upstream and downstream activities, such as employee commutes and vendor supply chains. Effectively measuring this piece of the data puzzle requires substantial collaboration across business units.