Bouwinvest gains record number of five-star GRESB rankings for Dutch investment fund vehicles

Dutch institutional real estate manager Bouwinvest Real Estate Investors once again delivered a stellar sustainability performance in this year’s Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) rankings compared with 2019, with its Dutch Residential Fund and Dutch Hotel Fund awarded five stars, the highest possible rating, for the first time.

Each of the Dutch funds focusing on residential, office, retail, hotels and healthcare  generated an above-average score compared with their international peers, according to GRESB’s latest results. Bouwinvest’s Dutch Office Fund has had a five-star ranking for several years and this year the Office Fund as well as the Hotel Fund were distinguished as Global Sector Leaders. Thanks to these improvements, Bouwinvest is on track towards its goal of achieving an above-average sustainability rating by 2021 for 80% of its investments, which total more than €12.9 billion of invested capital worldwide.

With its five-star rating, Bouwinvest’s Dutch Residential Fund ranks among the top 20% best- performing funds participating in the GRESB global benchmark. The fund increased its score by four points this year to a total of 88 points.

Bouwinvest’s Dutch Hotel Fund booked the biggest improvement with an increase of no less than nine points. As Global Sector Leaders, the Hotel Fund and Bouwinvest’s Dutch Office Fund rank among the best performing funds participating in the GRESB ratings worldwide.

Bouwinvest’s Dutch Retail and Dutch Healthcare Fund were awarded four stars as in previous years.

The strong improvement of the Dutch sector funds is due largely to Bouwinvest’s efforts to make all its properties more sustainable through energy consumption and carbon emission reductions. This has  been facilitated by the availability of ever larger amounts of environmentally-related data, particularly on the energy consumption of Bouwinvest’s assets. In addition, four of the five funds obtained the maximum number of points possible for the management section of the GRESB survey, with the fifth lagging on just one point, partly due to improvements in the areas of stakeholder engagement, leadership and risk management.

Mark Siezen, Chief Client Officer (CCO) at Bouwinvest, said: "We are proud that all our Dutch sector funds are among the most sustainable real estate funds worldwide. We aim to create social and financial returns for our clients in line with our goal of creating Real Value for Life and we see that both existing and new investors recognise and appreciate our sustainability efforts. Together with our partners and tenants, we are working on making our portfolio carbon neutral – or Paris Proof - by 2045 at the latest and we are taking extra steps to achieve our climate targets. Only by working together can we make our buildings even more energy efficient.”