The Involvement of Real Estate Companies in Sustainable Development—An Analysis from the SDGs Reporting Perspective

Abstract

As transparency has become the new paradigm of economic activities, we set out to analyse the extent to which the EU real estate companies legitimise their role in society through the sustainable development goals (SDGs) while meeting stakeholders’ information needs. Applying the content analysis, the sustainability reports and the annual reports of the entities from the real estate sector, from 2016 to 2018, were studied in order to highlight the priority SDGs of the field and the extent to which they are integrated in their business models. In addition, we evaluated, based on a quality score, the depth with which the entities report their sustainability commitments. The results of the study show that although more and more real estate entities are expressing their interest for sustainable development, there is still a large gap between the assumed intentions and the real actions undertaken by the companies. Most of them do not have the strategy, culture and tools needed to turn sustainability commitments into concrete actions. According to the average quality score (2.99 out of 5), the entities present their sustainability aspirations mostly qualitatively and report few quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) to reveal the degree of achievement of the priority SDGs, such as: SDG 11—Sustainable cities and communities, SDG 13—Climate action and SDG 8—Decent work and economic growth.

Improvement of the real estate transparency through digitalisation

“…Taking into account that in the context of current and future challenges, the sustainability/corporate responsibility reports represent the main communicating way of sustainability values to the stakeholders (Belluci et al, 2019;Ionașcu et al, 2020), we chose to study the sustainability reports published by the real estate entities from EU during 2016-2018. In this paper, the real estate companies are considered the entities that buy, sell, develop and manage buildings and/or land for commercial, residential and industrial purposes.…”

“…Content analysis is a very popular method among researchers in various fields due to the flexibility and systematised structure, being frequently applied in studying the non-financial information reported by entities (Belluci et al, 2019). In real estate research, this method was applied mostly to evaluate the sustainability levels in terms of sustainability practices amongst property companies (Laposa & Villupuram, 2010;Glass, 2012;Warren-Myers, 2012;Razali et al, 2017;Rashidfarokhi et al, 2018;Ionașcu et al, 2020).…”

“…Due to the economic, social and environmental importance, the corporate social responsibility practices in real estate may play the most critical role in sustainable development, because the construction sector generates almost 10% of GDP, provides 20 million jobs (European Commission, 2012), and in the same time is the world's largest consumer of energy and producer of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (accounting for 36% of global final energy use and 39% of energy-related CO2 emissions) (Hsieh et al, 2020, p. 1). In the last years, it has increased the interest of the real estate entities in sustainability practices, integrating the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) in their business strategy, and thus contributing to the real estate transparency improvement (Ionașcu et al, 2020).…”

Embracing sustainability in the drive from ordinary to outstanding: case examples from Emirates, Jumeirah and Rotana

“…In the opinion of Ionascu et al (2020), corporate responsibility is synonymous with property investments, that display the implications of sustainability for real estate development and corporate obligation strategies. This can be accomplished by means of implementing corporate real estate sustainability management (CRESM) that integrates the economic, social, environmental and institutional aspects of actual property organizations.…”

“…Further, a number of companies in which 35% of the SRs focus on SDG 11 are taking measures to protect the herbal and cultural heritage. This includes designing new homes that respect the architectural style of traditional homes, retaining agricultural land, developing green spaces in the urban environment and paying compensatory taxes for the introduction of development-free spaces (Ionascu et al, 2020).…”