“Quality, granular, auditable data removes doubt from a deal, and ultimately doubt can be expensive because the buyer will be pricing it in.”Chanel Turner-Ross - Marketing Director (Europe) at Utopi
ESG, Evidence and the Value Question: An Industry Round Table
[The Shard, London – 10 June 2026 – co-hosted by RLB and Utopi]
There is no location quite like RLB’s offices in The Shard to bring together investors and asset managers from across London to discuss industry pressures around ESG and the realities of green premiums. And that’s exactly what RLB and Utopi did, co-hosting a round table on a question the market is circling but has not yet answered: How is ESG really moving transactions, lending and value, and is the data good enough to back it up?
The conversation was candid and practical, and here is a summary of where the room landed:
Physical risk has become financial risk.
With hold periods now measured in decades rather than years, the room was clear that physical and climate risk, flooding chief among them, is no longer a reporting footnote. It now sits at investment committee as a financial risk, embedded directly in underwriting.
ESG data increasingly dictates the capital expenditure an asset will need, and that requirement is being used at acquisition through to technical due diligence, and shows up in price chipping. So ultimately it’s needed to stay competitive and compliant. The implication is simple: The quality of an asset’s data decides whether that Capex story is evidenced or estimated, and estimated numbers get discounted hardest.
From EPC to exit: The hold-period value play.
For some lenders, EPCs are being used as a form of exit protection, and the more interesting conversation was about the upside in between. One scenario discussed was moving an asset from an EPC D to a B within three to six months of the hold, then underwriting the value that conversion created. The constraint, again, is data. Where granular energy data does not exist, as is often the case in industrial, you cannot underwrite what you cannot see.
Access to main-meter data alone is enough to set a baseline and start benchmarking, which is exactly the gap a lightweight metering layer such as Utopi Lite is built to close.
The same appetite is showing up in lender diligence more widely: The GRESB Lender Assessment now shares utility data from all sides for benchmarking, aiding in pricing and in analysis.
A green premium everyone believes in, but no-one can yet price.
On valuation, the consensus was nuanced. ESG is opening the pool to more investors and shaping exit yield more than it is moving headline valuations today. It is helping borrowers on debt margins during the hold. And where ESG is a hard mandate, pricing is being chipped at entry to ring-fence the capital needed to deliver against it.
Most agreed there is probably a green premium, but no-one could yet put a number on it. Until that changes, the lever the whole room could act on now is reducing operating cost and concentrating on net operating income: Reduce consumption, protect and grow NOI, and let the yield multiple do the rest. As the discussion kept returning to, it is all about evidence.
It all comes back to evidence.
If there was a single thread running through the session, it was this: ESG value is an evidence problem, and the market trusts what it can verify. RICS will drive standardisation over time, and its updated valuation standard points the direction of travel, but for now it remains guidance rather than a force reshaping the market. Standardisation needs transactions to evidence it, and transactions need data that stands up to diligence and refinance. That is the gap between belief and price, and it closes one verified deal at a time.
The data layer the market is asking for.
Every theme in the room resolved to the same requirement: Trustworthy, auditable, transaction-grade building data. That is the layer Utopi exists to provide. The Utopi Platform now runs across 85,000 rooms in 13 countries, built on more than 52 billion proprietary environmental data points, with an embedded Impact team that defends ROI to the IC rather than handing over a portal. It is GRESB, BREEAM, SFDR and RICS-ready by design, and it has already done the job the room described.
For Harrison Street’s AustralianSuper transaction, granular data across 1,616 beds gave a sophisticated institutional buyer a verifiable record of building performance that supported diligence and valuation. Utopi data aided in technical due diligence, it made the assets easier to trust, faster to assess and stronger to price; and ultimately removed doubt from the transaction.
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A special thanks to our friends at RLB for having us and co-hosting, and to everyone who shared so openly their experiences and knowledge. The green premium is there to be found, and the firms that find it first will be the ones that turned their building data into financial success.
If you’d like to continue the conversation, or see how this works across a live portfolio, we would be glad to talk.