SPR Webinar: What does social impact really mean to real estate investors?
What does social impact really mean to real estate investors and how much return are they willing to sacrifice for it?
A new study, surveying financial and sustainability managers across the real estate industry, puts a number on it: on average, 123 basis points of expected excess return given up in exchange for meaningfully improving tenant affordability. The research also uncovers what drives that willingness and reveals that not all social impact is valued equally, with health outcomes from deep retrofits commanding notably less appetite than affordability gains.
Join us for a webinar where Dirk Brounen and Martijn Stroom (University of Maastricht) will talk through their findings and what they mean in practice, opening the floor for discussion on how social impact can be more effectively identified, certified, and embedded in real estate investment strategies.
Dirk Brounen, Professor of Housing and Household Finance, Maastricht University
Dirk Brounen is Professor of Housing and Household Finance at Maastricht University. Dirk is a Weimer fellow at the Homer Hoyt Institute, and research fellow both at the European Center of Corporate Engagement and at the Tilburg Sustainability Center, and editor of FS Insight. His research interests include Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITS), housing economics, financial literacy of financial consumers and energy efficiency of the build environment. He has consulted the European Committee on the implementation of the energy performance certification, the Dutch Ministry of Justice on enhancing the monitoring of high frequency real estate transactions, the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs on nudging energy efficient behavior, and the Dutch Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs on the position of first-time buyers in the housing markets. His work appears in The European Economic Review, The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Financial Management, Real Estate Economics, and the Journal of Portfolio Management.
Martijn Stroom, Behavioral Scientist and Post-Doctoral researcher, Maastricht University School of Business and Economics
Martijn Stroom is a behavioral scientist working as a post-doc researcher at the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics. Martijn holds an MSc in Human Decision Science, and a PhD in Behavioral Science. His research varies across multiple topics, with the same recurring theme: investigating the inaccuracy of human judgment, factors that unconsciously influence resulting decisions, and the unawareness of that influence. In his research, Martijn combines lab-, online experiments, and advanced questionnaire architecture to explore the behavioral side of many real-life, relevant, economic, and societal problems. More specifically, he studied the effects of indoor environmental conditions on productivity, whether working from home really works, and the added value of climate labels in the Dutch housing market with publications in PLOS ONE (forthcoming), Frontiers in Psychology, and Judgement and Decision Making. Currently, Martijn leads a team in the development of a social scorecard to measure the ‘S’ of ESG in the real estate sector with a large US-based real estate investor manager.