Fundamentals Participant Q&A: Sinyi Group

Founded in 1981, Sinyi Group, or Sinyi Realty, is a Taiwan-based direct-owned real estate brokerage and an integrated real estate services provider, with more than 400 directly operated branches across Taiwan and businesses in mainland China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Sinyi is the first organization globally to complete Fundamentals.

What were the key drivers behind Sinyi Group’s decision to participate in Fundamentals, and how did the organization prepare for this submission?

As a GRESB Global Partner, Sinyi hoped to help connect Taiwan’s real estate sector with international sustainability practice. Participation in Fundamentals was therefore both an internal management decision and an industry leadership commitment. We wanted to test our existing approach against a globally recognized real estate framework and demonstrate that companies can begin with a clear, practical foundation. Thus, we approached Fundamentals not as a substitute for our existing sustainability work, but rather to connect and strengthen it further.

Preparation was led by our sustainability team, working alongside colleagues in corporate governance, investment office, operations, and our general affairs unit. Rather than starting from scratch, we began by mapping the indicators against what we already had in place to see where documentation already existed and where it needed to be brought together. Much of the work was less about creating new material than about consolidating evidence that sat in different places across the Group. This made the process much quicker and only took three weeks overall.

How does joining Fundamentals support Sinyi’s overall sustainability goals and strategy?

For Sinyi, Fundamentals is best understood as a form of top-level design. It sits between corporate ESG strategy and day-to-day implementation, providing a clear line of sight from commitment to policy, from policy to responsibility, and from responsibility to evidence and review. There are three ways it supports our overall goals.

• First, it clarified our priorities. A comprehensive sustainability agenda can easily become too broad. Fundamentals directed our attention to the governance and risk-management foundations that enable other initiatives to succeed.
• Second, it improved our internal alignment. The 17 indicators gave our sustainability, governance, risk, procurement, and operations teams a common reference point, so dependencies and ownership became clearer than when sustainability was treated as one function’s responsibility.
• Third, it supported disciplined implementation. Providing evidence encouraged us to move from informal practice to documented policy, defined processes, and repeatable oversight.

Together, these give us a foundation we can build on. Our 2030 net-zero ambition, energy management, renewable energy procurement, service carbon footprint reduction, and TCFD-aligned climate governance are all different forms of action. Fundamentals helps us sustain, evaluate, and improve them over time rather than treating each as separate projects.

How does Sinyi’s participation in Fundamentals help inform or shape conversations internally and with stakeholders?

For Sinyi, participating in GRESB helps create trust. By translating our policies, responsibilities, risks, and monitoring into a globally recognizable structure, it gives us a common language with investors, customers, regulators, business partners, and communities. It makes governance more transparent, expectations more comparable, and commitments more credible.

Internally, the framework has given our teams a shared reference point. Sustainability is no longer owned by a single function. Colleagues across governance, risk, procurement, and operations can see how their work connects to the same set of commitments, and conversations have become more concrete as a result.

Externally, completing Fundamentals signals progress toward an internationally recognized high bar for real estate sustainability management, making our commitments easier for stakeholders to understand, evaluate and trust.

With customers, it gives us a clearer way to answer questions we are increasingly being asked. Buyers and sellers want to know what a property will cost to run, how it will hold its value, and what risks come with its location. Having our governance and monitoring arrangements set out in a recognized structure means our agents can speak to how we assess those questions as a company, rather than relying on individual judgment from branch to branch.

What did the process reveal about where Sinyi already stood, and where there was room to grow?

Sinyi already had sustainability initiatives covering corporate governance, climate action, green buildings, responsible procurement, customer service, and community engagement. What we needed was a way to connect them within one coherent architecture.

Testing our arrangements against a globally recognized framework showed us both things. On the strengths side, more was already in place than we had given ourselves credit for, and the framework simply made it visible. The gaps were less about substance than about documentation and coordination: practices that worked well but were not written down consistently, or that sat with one team without a clear link to the rest. Our environmental policies were one example, covering everything the framework asked about but never formally set out in a single document.

The most useful part was the submission itself: working through whether our commitments were supported by explicit objectives, whether our governance structures assigned clear decision-making authority, whether our policies were comprehensive enough, and whether risk assessment reached both existing holdings and new acquisitions. Working through those questions gave our teams a clearer view of how their work supports the Group’s objectives.

Sinyi sits between buyers, sellers, and partners across many transactions each year. How does stronger governance shape the way sustainability and climate considerations reach those decisions?

Fundamentals focuses on governance and risk management rather than asset-level performance, and we find that distinction valuable. Strong outcomes depend on the quality of the management system behind them.

That system is what allows sustainability considerations to reach the decisions we are part of. On our commercial side, factors such as building certification, energy performance, and climate-related risks can provide additional context when clients assess the long-term quality and resilience of an asset, alongside more traditional considerations such as location, price, and market conditions.

This is what sustainable real estate means in a services business. We do not own most of the buildings we work with, but we sit between the parties who do. The stronger our own management system, the more consistently we can bring sustainability considerations into those relationships and support more informed decision-making.

What are the benefits of this assessment being available on demand, and of receiving the report four weeks after submission?

Being able to submit and re-submit year-round mattered to us practically. We could align the assessment with our own reporting cycle and internal review schedule rather than working to a fixed external deadline, which meant the preparation fitted alongside existing work instead of competing with it.

The four-week turnaround is what makes the cycle usable. Receiving indicator-level feedback within a month meant the findings were still current when we brought them back to our teams. We could discuss them while the submission was fresh in everyone’s mind and factor them into planning for the year ahead rather than waiting for a result that would arrive after those decisions had already been made.

Together, these support an iterative improvement cycle: identify gaps, strengthen controls, review effectiveness, and prepare for the next stage of performance disclosure. The 17 indicators and six core areas help move an organization from values to policies, from policies to responsibilities, and from responsibilities to evidence and review. That structure makes existing strengths more visible while showing where documentation, coordination, or monitoring can improve.

The focused scope and year-round availability lower the barrier to entry while retaining the rigor and investor relevance of the GRESB Real Estate Standard.

Now that you’ve done Fundamentals, what advice would you give to participants interested in doing the assessment?

Five things we would pass on:

• Start with purpose but translate it into management. Values create direction; the 17 indicators are what turn them into objectives, roles, policies, and controls.
• Do not wait for perfect data. Fundamentals looks at governance and risk management rather than asset-level performance, so you can begin while your building data is still improving. That is precisely what makes it a workable first step.
• Treat it as an enterprise exercise. Our sustainability team coordinated the submission, but the evidence came from various teams. Involve them early.
• Connect initiatives rather than accumulating them. Most companies have more in place than they realize, such as certifications, climate analysis, carbon management, and stakeholder engagement. Through Fundamentals, these can be linked together rather than adding another separate initiative. It also provides a useful way to recognize and validate the value of work that is already underway. This can help teams see their existing efforts as part of a broader sustainability management system, rather than isolated initiatives.
• Expect the evidence requirement to be the useful part. Having to show how a commitment is governed, documented, and reviewed is where the real value sits, and where most of the learning happened for us.

We hope our experience can encourage more real estate companies, including those that are new to GRESB and those seeking to consolidate existing sustainability work, to take a structured first step through Fundamentals.

Sinyi’s 2025 Sustainability Report sets out an ESG strategy spanning environmental sustainability, social inclusion, corporate governance, and sustainable supply chain management, working toward a 2030 vision of co-creating a sustainable good life through business ethics and becoming a world-class service enterprise.

Climate and environment

• Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions down 48% against a 2017 baseline
• Carbon footprint per real estate service transaction down 33%
• Renewable energy use at 44.3%
• 2030 net-zero ambition, supported by energy management, renewable energy procurement and service carbon footprint reduction
• Climate governance aligned with the TCFD framework across governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets
• Climate-related financial disclosure maturity assessed at Level 5+, the highest level in that model

Governance and supply chain

• Top 5% of listed companies in Taiwan’s corporate governance evaluation for 12 consecutive years
• Sustainable procurement aligned with ISO 20400, with a 100% pass rate among suppliers reviewed