We believe that integrity, honesty and corporate responsibility are essential to ensuring we do our job properly and will, in turn, enable us to optimise returns for our clients. We are committed to upholding the highest ethical standards and compliance stewardship in all our business dealings and we avoid conflicting interests. To ensure accountability and transparency, we set targets, based on international sustainability standards, which allow us to monitor our progress.
In 2018, we devoted particular attention to making rental contracts ‘green’ and our procurement more sustainable.
Green leases
The Retail Fund continued its Green Lease initiative in 2018, adding 28 Green Leases to take the total to 99 Green Leases in the portfolio. These lease agreements incorporate sustainability clauses, with the aim of increasing and enhancing the information exchange between the Retail Fund and its tenants. This in turn creates opportunities to improve environmental performance. Combined with the installation of smart meters at tenant level, the Fund sees this as the first step towards more far-reaching green leases in the future.
Sustainable procurement and business partner selection
To promote and increase sustainable procurement, we launched a project with IVBN (Association of Institutional Property Investors in the Netherlands) and a number of fellow fund managers to engage and assess the Fund’s suppliers using a sustainability web tool. Current and future suppliers will be assessed on their sustainable commitments, policies and behaviour. Bouwinvest has Service Level Agreements with its property managers, who are assessed each quarter on topics related to administrative management, technical management (including sustainability), commercial management and tenant satisfaction.
Monitoring tool
Following a successful pilot in 2017, last year the Fund implemented a newly-developed online monitoring tool for the effective management and maintenance of properties. The tool helps the Fund to register, schedule, manage and monitor standard inspections and mandatory inspections, as well as evacuation exercises, certifications and insurance policies. In effect, it is an early warning system for inspections, certifications and other health & safety procedures. The tool helps the Fund to reduce its strict liability and total costs of ownership. It can lead to savings of up to 15%, while minimising user costs, maintaining the quality and value of the properties and preventing unwanted vacancies.
Target on enhance responsible business operations |
All new rental contracts include a sustainability clause | On track. 28 of 82 contracts |
All property managers procure according to sustainability declarations suppliers (IVBN) | Work in progress. |
Business partners selected on the basis of integrity | No issues. |
We made these targets more measurable in the Fund Plan 2019-2021 by setting a target of 10% annual increase in rental contracts that include green clauses. We also realised the target related to the integrity of our business partners by recording zero incidents and sanctions as a result of non-compliance. One of the measures aimed at improving the tenant journey will result in a portal for all our tenants in 2021; this contains all the information relevant to tenants, including sustainability performance, query tracking and other services.