Evaluating Climate-Risk Analytics Providers for Commercial Real Estate

In a recent webinar hosted by ULI’s Urban Resilience program, panelists reflected on their experiences implementing physical climate-risk assessments in their businesses.

Following the launch of the new report, How to Choose, Use, and Better Understand Climate-Risk Analytics, the webinar highlighted how to leverage the report’s findings on physical risk data analytics products to better evaluate climate risk in the land use industry.

The number of climate analytics data, software, and consulting services has been increasing due to the increased frequency of extreme weather events due to climate change. The new report from ULI, in partnership with LaSalle Investment Management, answers the following questions:

• How do physical risk analytics firms measure climate change, and what do they measure?
• How are real estate investment firms assessing and addressing physical risk data in their business today?
• To what extent, if any, is current physical risk priced into commercial real estate?
• How can real estate investors and climate-risk analytics providers improve decision-making?

Anne Peck, vice president, head of ESG+R, TA Realty, shares, “There’s more than 60 groups out there now available to provide [analysis of climate risk] so you know, evaluating who you’re going to use and understanding the methodologies that they provide. So you can match theirs with yours, right? So however your corporation wants to view it and evaluate it’s important to align those.”

“You should be asking lots of good questions and trying to understand what the underlying data is, meaning many of the providers are selling the same data set in different ways. You should ensure that you’re not just buying a much more expensive set of outcomes with the same data because the colors look better or the report is a little longer. There are good questions to be asked to the diligence of the providers, and you should definitely be doing those things, but you should go ahead and use [a climate-risk analytics provider],” said J.P. Flaherty, managing director, global head of sustainability and building technologies, Tishman Speyer.

“It’s so interesting that everybody said [in the report], ‘We’re not seeing it in the market, but we’re doing this,’ you know, and I think that you know also reflects who was interviewed, right, because the real estate industry is very big, very diverse, and there’s probably a lot of people out there who are not thinking about it. But there are a small and growing number of owners and investors who really are thinking about it,” said Elena Alschuler, head of Americas sustainability, LaSalle, “Even between the three of us on this conversation and the others that were interviewed for this report, you know, we’re all doing it different ways.”

The webinar opened with a presentation by report co-author and webinar moderator Spenser Robinson, professor and director of real estate at Central Michigan University.

Read more about the state of the climate-risk analytics market and how to evaluate climate-risk analytics providers in the new research report, How to Choose, Use, and Better Understand Climate-Risk Analytics.

Watch the recording of the “How to Choose, Use, and Better Understand Climate-Risk Analytics” webinar on ULI’s Knowledge Finder today.