Sustainability as a structuring discipline.
A sustainability claim usually arrives late. The scheme is financed, designed, and built, and then the sustainability section gets written from whatever survived. Nobody drafting it was in the room when the terms were set. The claim is true in the sense that the features exist, and empty in the sense that no one had to answer for them. One question separates the two, and it takes a sentence. At which stage did this become a term, and who signed it off?
A target written into a design brief can be traded away at value engineering, quietly, by people acting reasonably under cost pressure. A target written into financing terms cannot. Losing it means reopening the terms with the party that priced them. The difference is structural rather than cultural, which is why it holds under pressure.
The industry's own diagnosis points at the same place. McKinsey reports global construction productivity growing 0.4 per cent annually between 2000 and 2024, against 2 per cent in the wider economy, and names fewer and better handovers among the foundational measures (McKinsey and Company, 2024). Every handover is a renegotiation. A sustainability specification is the easiest line to discount at one, because its cost lands immediately and its return arrives years later in somebody else's accounts.
We took the other side of that. Capital structuring and delivery sit in one team, so the specification and the operating result belong to the same people.
Sustainability inputs are not added at handover. They are tested at five stages of the asset's life, and the same capital and delivery team signs off each one.
Structuring: the sustainability performance indicators are written into the brief and into the financing terms.
Design pack: building systems and material specification are tested against those indicators, not against a general intention.
Build: what gets built is checked against the design pack, so nothing is downgraded quietly.
Commissioning: operating systems are proved to perform to the indicators before handover.
Operation: annual operating data is compared against the indicators the asset was financed to deliver.
The continuity is the mechanism. Accountability changes hands at no stage, so there is no stage at which the standard can be discounted into a margin. Verification at completion is external by design, against BREEAM, NABERS, or LEED, with the standard set by jurisdiction and asset type. We do not publish our own ESG ratings.
Since 2017 the schemes structured this way have returned a 10 to 14 per cent premium against the conventional-spec comparator for the same scheme type, sector, and geography. The audit runs annually and covers acquisition cost, operating cost, occupancy, rent or revenue per square metre, void cost, and disposal yield, with the sustainability inputs isolated so the marginal contribution is calculated rather than asserted. It is an internal audit, signed off year on year, and the methodology goes to qualified counterparties on request. It is not third-party assurance, and we do not describe it as such.
The external test came from the debt market. A nine-figure sustainability-linked bond, its proceeds tied to defined indicators across the operating portfolio, was marketed against the credit curve for comparable vanilla debt of the same tenor and rating. It priced inside. That number was set by people who owed us nothing and who had the conventional alternative in front of them.
The cost of the cycle is real and worth stating plainly. Structuring this way is slower than screening. Indicators written into financing terms are harder to renegotiate when a site turns awkward. A scheme that cannot carry its indicators through to operation does not get funded, even where the headline return looks acceptable, and we have declined schemes on that basis.
A sustainability story is what someone tells you. A sustainability discipline is what someone can show you the records of. Each claim we make is testable against a record that exists independently of our own assertion: the portfolio audit, inspectable under NDA, the bond term sheet and the pricing comparison at issuance, and the GREAP platform statement with its portfolio reporting.
That is the test we would apply to anyone asking us to price their sustainability position, so it is the test we publish ours to. The data sheet carries the methodology, the result, and the accountable name behind each claim.
Rami Saadi
CEO