The deadline for GRESB assessment is approaching, pushing real estate companies to complete their sustainability assessments before the July 1 submission deadline. Unlike the BREEAM or LEED certifications developers acquire in part for marketing reasons, GRESB functions as a tool for organizations to take a critical look at themselves.
By agreeing to participate, companies create an opportunity for management to ask potentially awkward but revealing questions about their company culture, management style, and employee efficiency and motivation. The assessment’s value is backed by the fact that banks increasingly consider GRESB scores when making lending decisions, seeing it as a worthwhile measure of a company’s viability. A growing number of institutional investors also include the GRESB score in their ESG due diligence, assuming that a seller with a high GRESB score presents a lower investment risk.
Mint Investments has embraced this approach despite a recent European climbdown on ESG requirements, including significant changes to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
“Where CSRD is complex and purely on reporting, the GRESB is a much more accessible way to showcase and give guidance on improving sustainability performance,” explains sustainability consultant Steffen Walvius. “Since it scores a company’s performance plus benchmarks with peers, it gives much more benefits to an organization.” His company Walvius Partners works with companies around Europe as a consultant on the process.
While environmental metrics are important, they represent just one component of the GRESB assessment, which evaluates companies across three key areas: Management (strategy, leadership, policies), Performance (energy consumption, emissions, water usage + waste generation), and Development (ESG implementation during construction phases).
Sebastien Dejanovski, a founding partner of Mint Investments, the first Czech company to participate in GRESB, describes the process as motivational: “It’s like going to school. You don’t really want to study. But then, when you realize what it means to learn about things, you understand that the GRESB process benefits you a lot. It’s enabled us to be much more effective in property management.”
Mint Investments has seen its GRESB score rise from 33 in 2021 to 75 currently, with each improvement driving tangible business benefits. And it’s not just useful in terms of managing its assets better…it’s better for the whole company’s management.
An example is the employee survey Mint carried out at the beginning of the process. Anonymous employee feedback collected through the process highlighted issues with the company’s office space. This eventually convinced the company’s partners to invest in a new workspace despite having several years left on their existing lease.
“GRESB is like introducing extra sensors,” Walvius explains, describing it as a powerful management tool for companies. “If you’re flying a plane and you’re in the cockpit, you want to have as many meaningful measurements as possible to make sure you’re flying correctly.”
A key strength of the GRESB framework is its sector neutrality through peer group comparisons. Companies are benchmarked against others in the same sector—data centers against data centers, warehouses against warehouses—ensuring scores reflect relative ESG performance rather than absolute judgments about the sector itself.
Unlike many property companies that struggle to collect complete energy consumption data from its tenants, Mint stands out with 100% coverage of its portfolio. “Many institutional investors can maybe reach 40% of the floor area where they know utility consumption,” noted Walvius.
This transparency has become a significant advantage in transactions and financing. Banks like ING offer better rates to companies with strong GRESB scores, and Mint’s credentials helped them secure distribution of their residential fund through ČSOB, which controls 30% of the Czech market.
“When people ask me how it’s possible that ČSOB is distributing our fund like the first one ever in Czech Republic, one of the reasons is that we understand their requirements,” says Dejanovski.
The GRESB system is designed to encourage continuous improvement. At the beginning of the process, companies have a “grace period” during which scores aren’t made public. From then on, the assessment calendar follows a clear annual cycle. The portal opens on April 1, with submissions due by July 1. Following validation and benchmarking in August, preliminary results are released to participants on September 1, with a two-week correction period. Final results become available to participants and investors on October 1.
Implementing GRESB gradually over multiple years appears to yield the best results. “Having a gradual approach is very important because you make sure that people don’t hate GRESB and you have time to really pick the things that you think are important first, slowly introduce it,” explained Walvius. “If you’re really a late adapter and you do it only when a bank is asking it and then you have a year to scramble, that’s not a very good point.”
The structure of the rating regime makes it impossible to score 100 points, creating ongoing incentives for enhancement.
As ESG requirements face political headwinds in some regions, Mint’s leadership believes a pragmatic approach to sustainability practices delivers business value regardless of regulatory changes. “If you truly embrace it, if you’re brutally honest with yourself and accept that you don’t actually know that much…then you can really start to understand. Our people are proud now that we have the GRESB,” said Dejanovski. “It’s no longer a lot of work because the process have become efficient.”
For companies still on the fence, Dejanovski’s conclusion is straightforward: “I think the biggest risk is not to do it.”
Walvius Partners recently became an official partner of GRESB, making it the first official service provider in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
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