The Value of Visibility for Building Performance and Decarbonization

By Josh Lowell
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One theme surfaced repeatedly during Climate Week NYC this year: most commercial real estate organizations no longer need to be convinced that sustainability matters.

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Owners, investors, tenants, and sustainability teams understand the business case. They recognize growing pressure from regulations, investor expectations, rising operating costs, and market demand for higher-performing assets. The challenge facing the industry today is not setting goals, but implementation. The questions become when to act, where to invest, and how to prioritize limited resources. The answer begins with visibility into building performance.

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Visibility influences capital allocation, operational planning, utility procurement, risk management, investor reporting, and asset valuation. When owners do not understand how a building consumes energy, they do not have the information or confidence to make decisions. Uncertainty can delay investment, obscure opportunities for improvement, and make it difficult to distinguish between assets that are genuinely underperforming and those that simply lack reliable data.

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Strategic Decarbonization Requires Understanding How Buildings Actually Perform.

Across the commercial real estate industry, organizations are making decisions about capital projects, equipment replacement cycles, energy procurement, emissions reductions, and regulatory compliance. Those decisions require a basic understanding of asset performance.

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Yet many commercial real estate building owners and investors still lack access to complete whole-building energy data across their portfolios. Without that visibility, it becomes difficult to establish baselines, identify performance challenges, measure progress, report accurate results, and build a credible business case for investments.

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Proxy estimates for energy consumption, utility spend, and/or greenhouse gas emissions can be valuable starting points. These estimates help organizations understand potential exposure, establish preliminary baselines, begin portfolio-wide assessments, and meet reporting requirements. But estimates are not a substitute for actual performance data when investment decisions are on the line.

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Coordination is King.

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‍The industry's data challenges reflect a broader structural reality within commercial real estate: building performance is shared, but building control is often fragmented.

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Owners may control capital planning, major building systems, and portfolio strategy. Tenants may control operating schedules, equipment usage, space utilization, and in many cases, the majority of building energy consumption.

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This creates the well-known split-incentive problem, where the party funding a building-level improvement is not always the party receiving the direct benefit. Even when owners and tenants share sustainability objectives, they often lack clear mechanisms for collaboration, information sharing, and accountability. Tenants may collect and share building-level operational data, but if there is no framework to pass that on to the building owner, progress may stall.

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The hurdles becomes even more pronounced as organizations pursue increasingly sophisticated sustainability objectives. Decarbonization roadmaps, building performance standards, net-zero commitments, and climate disclosure requirements all rely on information that frequently sits across multiple stakeholders. Success, therefore, does not simply depend on collecting data, but on creating processes that ensure the right information reaches the right decisionmakers at the right time.

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As a result, the challenge is not always identifying an efficiency opportunity. More often, the challenge is aligning stakeholders around the information and actions necessary to pursue it. That is why some of the most effective pathways to decarbonization today are not built solely on technology and AI-enabled software platforms, but on establishing shared governance and green leasing.
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Green Leasing and Building Certifications Are Valuable Implementation Tools.

"How to break down the barriers surrounding owner-tenant misalignment" was a major theme throughout NYC Climate Week and particularly on the panel, Aligning Green Leasing and LEED v5 to Advance Building Performance, on which RE Tech participated. Two solutions were regularly shared: green leasing and building certifications.

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Green leases establish expectations for data sharing, collaboration, and cost recovery, and divide responsibilities between owners and tenants. Meanwhile, green building certifications (GBCs) like LEED provide a framework for measuring, validating, and tracking building performance. Together, they can create the structure necessary for continuous improvement. Most importantly, they help transform sustainability from a collection of goals into a repeatable management process.

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That is why our clients are increasingly interested in the benefits of GBCs and green leasing, because they can break down the barriers that cause misalignment.
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Data Empowers the Next Stage of Corporate Sustainability and Savings.

In, conclusion data visibility creates the foundation for virtually every subsequent sustainability decision, and strategies become more effective when rooted in real performance data rather than assumptions.
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The industry has spent the last decade building ambition. The next decade will be defined by execution supported by mechanisms such as green leasing, green building certifications, and technology. For commercial real estate owners, execution begins with a confident understanding of how a building is performing. Everything else follows from there.