2025 marked another year of deep investment in the success of GRESB members. This year, we devoted considerable focus and resources to rethinking and strengthening the GRESB user experience, delivering more responsive support, higher quality and reliability across our products and services, and a sharper emphasis on delivering value where it matters most to members.
From new solutions and improved guidance to expanded education and services, we continued to enhance the tools, insights, and products that power your decision-making and support long-term value creation.
Reduced reporting burden and improved guidance
In 2025, the GRESB Member Success team delivered clearer, more practical resources to help participants navigate GRESB assessments and scoring methodologies with ease. These updates included:
- Smoother reporting process: More structured, user-friendly guidance materials to eliminate unnecessary complexity and enhance understanding of requirements.
- Clearer methodologies: Refined guidance to support high-quality data submissions.
Read more on the 2025 improvements to GRESB reporting resources.
GRESB also introduced several technical changes to streamline the overall reporting experience, including:
- Removal of year-on-year duplicate reporting: For the first time in 2025, Real Estate and Infrastructure Asset Participants could forgo reporting on certain policy indicators (PO1–3) if their policies and supporting documents remained unchanged. In these cases, the previous year’s validation status and points are automatically carried over.
- Asset Spreadsheet: In addition to improved guidance, we removed unnecessary validation rules, improved aggregation logic, and unmerged cells to streamline data transfer from external systems and made the previous year’s asset-level spreadsheet directly accessible through the Asset Portal.
- Non-English language uploads: GRESB is now capable of translating files from over 100+ language pairs, enabling participants to upload evidence and documentation in languages other than English.
Lastly, the introduction of GRESB Quickstart provides tailored onboarding support, helping new and existing members who choose to use this service get up and running quickly with personalized training and resources.
These efforts have already resulted in strong feedback: over 500 participants completed a survey on their 2025 submission experience, giving GRESB an average satisfaction rating of 4.35 out of 5.
Enhanced responsiveness and member support
Alongside improved resources and guidance, the GRESB Member Success team also raised the bar for responsiveness and quality, delivering faster, more reliable support than ever before. Average first response times for helpdesk inquiries fell from more than a day in 2024 to just over four hours, while resolution times dropped to just over nine hours—ensuring members receive the timely, reliable support they need.
With 98% of requests resolved within target, participants awarded the GRESB Helpdesk a 96% Customer Satisfaction Score, consistently highlighting the professionalism and attentiveness of the team.
Score Contribution for real estate
Developed in response to member requests for greater transparency into how asset-level performance shapes portfolio scores, the new Score Contribution gives real estate managers greater insight into how individual assets contribute to a portfolio’s overall GRESB Score, in the aggregate and across key performance metrics.
Launched in March, the tool is available at no additional cost to all existing GRESB Real Estate Participants as part of their membership and supports deeper understanding of scoring outcomes and improvement opportunities.
Early access to data for real estate and infrastructure
For the first time in GRESB’s history, participants are able to access their data months earlier than ever before—well ahead of the October release. As of July, Real Estate Participants can access asset-level data via the Asset Analytics tab in the GRESB Portal and Infrastructure Participants can access submitted assessment data via the 2025 Submitted Data feature in the Data Exporter.
Early access to data empowers participants and their investors to take timely, informed action—supporting better risk management and performance analysis, improved operational efficiency and more resilient portfolios.
Transparent and predictable evolution of GRESB Standards
The GRESB Standards are continuously evolving through the work of the GRESB Foundation and engagement with the real asset community. In 2025, we reinforced our commitment to a predictable and transparent Standards development process by introducing the Principles for Governing Standards Development—a framework that ensures future changes are inclusive, accountable, and aligned with members’ needs and investor expectations. For the first time, we also communicated two years’ worth of Standards changes in advance, providing members with unprecedented visibility and ample notice to prepare.
This year also brought meaningful updates to the Standards: Among others, the introduction of a new approach to scoring Energy Efficiency in the Real Estate Standard to reward highly efficient assets while still recognizing year-over-year incremental improvements. Additionally, GRESB launched a thorough evaluation process for building certifications, with over 250 certification schemes and 140 brands being evaluated against the revised criteria. Read the full 2025 Standards updates here and find more information on the long-term trajectory of the Standards in the 2025 Foundation Roadmap.
New and expanded Assessments & benchmarking
In 2025, GRESB continued to evolve its Assessments, Benchmarks, and products to meet the changing needs of the real assets industry.
Improved Benchmark Reports
As part of our commitment to empowering your investment strategies with transparent, actionable data and deeper insights, we have made significant improvements to the Benchmark Reports for both real estate and infrastructure. The updated reports will offer improved usability, intuitive navigation, and more targeted analysis of portfolio performance and scoring.
These enhancements directly address member feedback for more intuitive, insightful reports that make it easier to interpret and act on performance data.
A new Residential Component
In 2025, GRESB launched a new Residential Component for real estate, featuring sector-specific indicators that reflect the unique performance drivers of residential assets. The new component ensures greater relevance, better benchmarking, and more tailored insights for residential-focused participants and investors.
The first Data Center Benchmark
In 2025, GRESB and Infrastructure Masons partnered to develop the first global sustainability benchmark for data center investments. The new benchmark addresses the unique characteristics and challenges of one of the real estate industry’s most energy- and resource-intensive sectors. With a pilot underway in 2025, the Data Center Assessment will formally launch in 2026.
Real Estate Lender Assessment
In 2025, GRESB launched the Real Estate Lender Assessment, establishing a benchmark for lenders, with plans to expand the initiative further in 2026. This initiative helps lenders align with sustainability goals and make more informed decisions regarding their loan book and investments.
The addition of new components, assessments, and benchmarks provides members with more relevant, sector-specific insights to strengthen investment decisions and sustainability strategies.
Improved Customized Peer Groups for real estate
Based on member feedback, GRESB introduced several improvements to the usability, customizability, and readability of Customized Peer Groups in 2025. These include improved peer search, filtering, and selection; adding an option to start fresh or reuse the previous year’s criteria selection; and the ability to delete the customized peer groups during the customization period. The updates make it easier for Real Estate Participants to tailor their benchmarking experience and focus on what matters most for their strategy.
REAL Benchmarks
Launched in 2024, REAL Benchmarks is the world’s largest asset-level performance dataset of investor-owned properties globally.
In 2025, REAL Benchmarks was expanded to include performance thresholds for the top 15% and top 30% of assets, along with new ASHRAE thresholds—supporting EU Taxonomy alignment analysis and unlocking deeper insights into how individual assets contribute to overall portfolio performance.
These updates mark the transition of REAL Benchmarks into a customizable benchmarking tool, empowering users to choose the benchmarks that best suit their needs and strategy. Stay tuned for more updates as REAL Benchmarks continues to evolve into a flexible, data-driven solution for asset-level decision-making across your portfolio.
GRESB Accredited Professional (AP) Program
This year, GRESB AP was expanded to include infrastructure with the launch of the GRESB AP – Infrastructure Team Leader exam. This new credential is designed to equip infrastructure professionals with the knowledge and skills to navigate GRESB reporting, enhance sustainability performance, and drive informed investment decisions.
Alongside the new infrastructure credential and the updated real estate exam, GRESB also launched an improved online training platform featuring updated training materials, new videos, investor training, and exclusive content for GRESB APs.
Today, the GRESB AP community has already grown to more than 550 credentialed professionals worldwide, underscoring the program’s expanding role in building expertise and advancing sustainability across both real estate and infrastructure.
GRESB Solution Providers
In 2025, GRESB introduced GRESB Solution Providers—a new type of partnership that connects managers with organizations offering specialized tools, technologies, and services that drive tangible sustainability performance beyond the GRESB Assessment. Together, these organizations form an ecosystem of support that helps managers go beyond disclosure and deliver real-world impact.
Platform improvements
GRESB made substantial behind-the-scenes improvements to enhance data quality, platform functionality, and ease of use. This included optimizing the GRESB Portal for faster load times and a smoother user experience by reducing cached data requirements during submissions and moving resource-intensive processes, such as data exports, to a more efficient framework. We also continued to strengthen our data quality and review procedures to ensure accuracy, consistency, and trust in reported results.
Looking to 2026
These investments and developments reflect our ongoing commitment to enhancing the value and quality of our services and delivering an exceptional user experience for GRESB members. Looking ahead to the remainder of 2025 and 2026, we will continue to build on these investments—expanding our solutions, deepening our capabilities, and advancing real-world outcomes across global markets.
Should you have any questions or require further details about any of the improvements we’ve made so far this year, please contact us.