As part of its participation in the CongrEGA’24 event – the 2nd Ibero-American Congress of Asset Management Engineering, Cushman & Wakefield (C&W) received the “Best Paper Sustainability” award for presenting the paper “Pathways towards Net-zero: Market Data Insights on Portuguese Real Estate Energy Performance,” a study developed by the consultancy’s Sustainability & ESG and Valuation & Advisory teams.
The study analyzed the energy performance of a dataset of 1,200 real estate assets, in which C&W provided consultancy or was involved in transactions or leases in Portugal. A Python-based methodology, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), was used to extract key information from energy certificates. This information was then subjected to statistical analysis of energy performance data, location, size, and consumption distribution to assess the influence of these variables on the energy performance of the assets.
This study represents a significant step by providing a very comprehensive sample of the current performance of the Portuguese real estate market. The results revealed that, at present, only 4% of properties are aligned with the energy performance standards of the European Taxonomy for climate mitigation. The study also showed that just over 50% of properties are aligned with the limits of CRREM (Carbon Risk Real Estate Monitor), a tool increasingly used by real estate investors to assess climate risk and energy efficiency of buildings. “Portugal has ambitious decarbonization targets set by Europe. To achieve them, it is essential to have robust data on the real estate market, because ‘what cannot be measured, cannot be improved’.”
“This study conducted by the Cushman & Wakefield team is a significant step in providing a comprehensive overview of the current performance of the Portuguese real estate market, which allows us to assist our clients and contribute to this necessary change,” comments Joana Pedro, Sustainability & ESG Services Manager in Portugal, Cushman & Wakefield. The CongrEGA gathered in Lisbon more than 300 delegates from the Lusophone and Hispanophone Asset Management communities spread across Europe, the Americas, and Africa.
This Pan-Iberian space covers over 700 million people and economies that are intensively dependent on engineering assets to establish critical services such as transport, food, water, energy, communications, health and safety, community infrastructures, defense, among others.
