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 analyzing 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.

A growing number of commercial real estate property owners are keen on improving environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) standards throughout their portfolio because sustainability improvements can substantially boost a property’s value. The U.S. Green Building Council reports that upfront investment in green building makes properties more valuable, with a growing number of building owners seeing a 10% or greater increase in asset value. Initiatives that align with sustainability certification programs like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) are likely to have the greatest impact on asset value.

To make an airtight business case for up-front investment in a new project, organizations need to determine the total cost of ownership and savings over time. When they replace older building systems with more modernized 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 normalized for factors such as production, occupancy, and weather.

Monitoring water use—in terms of overall reduction and intensity metrics like consumption per occupant—is an important measure of sustainability progress.

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

Simply reducing a building or portfolio’s dependence on fossil fuel is one of the first and most important measures of sustainability. As more organizations 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 organizations 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.