We believe that integrity, honesty and corporate responsibility are essential to ensuring we do our job properly and will, in turn, enable us to optimise returns for our clients. We are committed to upholding the highest ethical standards and compliance stewardship in all our business dealings and we avoid conflicting interests. To ensure accountability and transparency, we set tergets, based on international sustainability standards, which allow us to monitor our progress.
in 2018, we devoted particular focus to making rental contracts ‘green’ and making our procurement more sustainable.
Green rental contracts
For instance, the Fund encourages its tenants to be more sustainable by including standard green lease clauses in its lease contracts that embed the intended cooperation of the Fund and the tenants in its assets to improve sustainability. The Fund prefers to supplement these addenda with concrete agreements, such as access to data on energy use and parameters on joint investments in energy-saving measures. Despite a certain level of reluctance on the part of tenants, the Fund is managing to increase the number of so-called green leases it closes.
We have signed 21 green lease agreements with tenants that include clauses related to cooperation on improving sustainability (total amount of leases is 221). And together with our external property manager, we drew up a new standard for green lease agreements, which we will implement in 2019 as a standard appendix to every new lease. This will include clauses related to collective sustainability and efficiency goals for both landlord and tenants, making any improvement of sustainability a joint effort.
Sustainable procurement and business partner selection
To promote and increase sustainable procurement, we have launched a project with IVBN and a number of fellow fund managers to engage and assess the Fund’s suppliers using a sustainability web tool. Current and future suppliers will be assessed on their sustainable commitments, policies and behaviour.
Bouwinvest has Service Level Agreements with its property managers, who are assessed each quarter on topics related to administrative management, technical management (including sustainability), commercial management and tenant satisfaction.
For systematical maintenance and smaller renovations, we have drawn up a sustainable procurement schedule, which enables the property managers to make more sustainable choices when procuring from construction firms or other suppliers.
Target on enhance responsible business operations |
All new rental contracts include a sustainability clause | Achieved. |
All property managers procure according to sustainability declarations suppliers (IVBN) | Work in progress. |
Business partners selected on the basis of integrity | No issues. |
We made these targets more measurable in the Fund Plan 2019-2021 by specifying the number of green leases and setting a target of at least 20% green leases in the portfolio by the end of 2021. We also realised the target related to the integrity of our business partners by recording zero incidents and sanctions as a result of non-compliance. One of the measures aimed at improving the tenant journey will result in a portal for all our tenants in 2021; this contains all the information relevant to tenants, including sustainability performance, query tracking and other services.