The demands for building data made by banks and investors have a significant impact on the operational activities of companies in the real estate sector. This is according to a recent survey conducted by Apleona, ZIA and Coalition-X among 112 market participants. The results show that around 40 percent of respondents rate the influence of banks' data requirements on their operational business as strong to very strong. A comparable relevance is attributed to investor requirements, with 39 percent rating their influence as strong or very strong.
In comparison, the importance of regulatory requirements is rated as lower. For instance, about 24 percent of participants assess the influence of sustainability reporting under CSRD/ESRS as strong to very strong. For the EU Taxonomy, this figure is around 22 percent, and for the SFDR disclosure regulation, it is about 18 percent. These figures underline that requirements coming directly from financial partners currently carry the most weight for operational processes.
Challenges in Data Collection and Provision
The collection of ESG and building data remains predominantly manual, a method cited as primarily used by around 54 percent of respondents. This significantly surpasses other collection methods. Approximately 40 percent of data is obtained via property managers, while around 33 percent comes from facility managers. Digital solutions, in contrast, are used less frequently: CAFM, energy management, or smart metering systems are each employed by just under 30 percent. Just over a fifth of companies use specific ESG software platforms.
Dr. Jochen Keysberg, CEO of the Apleona Group, stated that the real estate industry had long accommodated heterogeneous data sets and manual processes, but this would increasingly become inefficient in the future. He emphasised that digitisation, automation, and especially the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) require reliable, uniformly defined, and usable data. Data quality is therefore a decisive prerequisite for unlocking new potential.
Further difficulties arise in providing data to banks and investors. Inconsistent data requirements are cited as the biggest problem by 70 percent of respondents. Every second participant also considers unclear definitions and reference parameters of KPIs to be a significant challenge. Missing data at building level, as well as manual, error-prone transfer processes, are described as obstructive by around 41 percent of respondents each.
Transparency and Future Strategies
Growing pressure to act is emerging from banks' and supervisory authorities' demands for traceability of the origin and processing of risk-relevant data, known as Data Lineage. This requires documenting where data comes from and how it has been processed or altered. Nearly half of the respondents are aware of these increasing requirements and are actively preparing for them. A further 30 percent are familiar with them but have not yet taken concrete measures.
At a European level, work is also underway to standardise building data, including the promotion of a digital building logbook. The industry initiative Coalition-X is simultaneously piloting a trustworthy and machine-readable data signature to confirm authenticity. ZIA acts as patron for this initiative, and Apleona is among the pilot partners testing the authenticity signing of ESG building data in operational use. The goal is to make data usable for automated processes and AI applications.
Jochen Schenk, Vice President of ZIA, stressed the necessity of clear definitions and reliable authenticity certificates between stakeholders. Data should be collected and sealed at its point of origin to then be securely passed on and used. Schenk pointed out that AI further reinforces the need for high-quality data, but at the same time can also contribute to improving data quality, for example, by early detection and correction of errors during collection.
