The GRESB Foundation Board has published the Foundation’s Principles for Governing the Standards Development Process, offering greater transparency into how the GRESB Standards are managed and improved over time. These Principles enhance the Standards Development Process, improving the governance of the Standards and ensuring that they evolve in a transparent, consistent way. They guide the Foundation’s approach to implementing annual, incremental updates, balancing the need for progress with the importance of stability and predictability. Ultimately, the Principles are designed to support and reinforce the collaboration between investors and managers to drive sustainable performance in the real estate and infrastructure industries.
Led by the Foundation Board, composed of representatives from GRESB Members and Partners, the GRESB Foundation oversees the evolution of the GRESB Standards, which includes setting, improving, reviewing, and approving the Standards on an annual basis. The Foundation’s mission is to support effective communication between investors and managers through the GRESB Standards. The Board relies on the expertise of the Real Estate and Infrastructure Standards Committees, who devise standards development proposals in response to the demands of industry stakeholders and in line with the Foundation’s Roadmap, which is published each year. The 2025 Foundation Roadmap can be found here.
As the Foundation Board evaluates changes to the Standards each year, they understand that the Standards must respond to investors’ demands for improved performance while offering managers forward-looking information about these changes and their scoring impacts. In response to this need for progress and predictability, the Board commissioned the Change Management Working Group—comprised of members of the Foundation Board, Standards Committees, and Expert Resource Groups—to develop the Principles as a critical step in formalizing a more transparent and effective Standards Development process.
For example, the Principles ask that Standards updates be classified based on their potential scoring impact, their magnitude, and pace of change. The Principles direct the Standards Committees to shift toward fixed or absolute thresholds when practical, such as the move to using ASHRAE standards to set absolute energy efficiency thresholds. The Principles also encourage the Standards to recognize exceptional performance and innovation, which will help differentiate participants and inform how the Standards evolve over time. Importantly, the Principles seek to maximize the value of the GRESB Assessment outputs by ensuring that the assessment results offer investment decision-useful insights while reducing reporting burden. Finally, each year, stakeholders will have the opportunity to provide feedback to the Foundation to inform future years’ Standards Development process.
The Foundation is confident that the Principles will support the ambition of both investors and managers as they adapt to an increasingly diverse and dynamic global market and help maintain GRESB’s role as a market transformation tool.
Read more about the principles here and check out the Pulse episode exploring why these principles matter for the future of GRESB Standards.