BuildingMinds: ESG data platform for real estate lands in Italy
The benefits that companies derive from applying ESG criteria are now well known: from improving their environmental and social impact to increasing their attractiveness for capital and resources. According to the Real Estate DATA HUB report, in 2024 a major growth in sustainability investments in the real estate sector is expected in Italy, a symptom of an awareness by companies and consulting firms of the importance of data to better position real estate assets on the market and into more business opportunities. These are the premises that have brought BuildingMinds, a company of the Swiss elevator and escalator giant Schindler Group, to the Italian market, which with its ESG data platform collaborates with stakeholders throughout the real estate ecosystem to collect data and provide owners and managers with tools to process them through various modeling methods, including carbon pricing scenarios and retrofit interventions, ultimately returning actionable insights and measures.
"The Real Estate sector in Italy has been investing heavily in ESG in recent years, and this is no coincidence. Our country has an aging building stock, consisting, for example, in the residential segment of about 73 percent of properties in the lowest energy classes (E-F-G). This contributes to a sector that at the European level is responsible for at least 40% of energy consumption and ⅓ of total CO2 emissions″ said Andrea Tassello, Country Manager for Italy at BuildingMinds.
"Achieving the goals set by the European Green Deal - to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent compared to 1990 by 2030 and to reach net zero emissions by 2050 - requires strategic planning to retrofit buildings to improve their energy performance while increasing their commercial value. After France, Spain, the UK and the US, BuildingMinds enters the Italian market at a crucial time for the sustainable transition of businesses and individuals with a new technology that can concretely support owners and managers by returning data on efficiency, financial benefits and risk management strategies based on insights from our tools."
Founded in 2019 in Berlin as a startup and led by CEO Marek Sacha, BuildingMinds represents the Schindler Group's desire to diversify its services with a focus on sustainability as the added value of its offerings. The company targets owners and managers of large assets and real estate funds, able to guide major interventions in the lifecycle of buildings such as, for example, major renovation projects or the adoption of energy-efficient systems. The focus is also on a new target audience: in fact, BuildingMinds is working on the development of an insight app for residents to help them foster day-to-day operational efficiency in their spaces.
With 141 employees located in Europe and active partnerships in several countries, today BuildingMinds supports real estate professionals along the entire value chain, providing useful insights for drafting reports, risk and profitability assessments, thus, carbon risk, stranding risk, CapEX, and cost simulation, without neglecting the interdependencies related to portfolio management.
Typically, such complex analyses force property owners and managers to employ numerous consultants to study retrofit actions and budgets to invest, which often results in onerous costs if not supported by appropriate technology.
For this reason, BuildingMinds has developed Retrofit Recommender, an AI-machine learning tool, allowing for real-time identification of the most effective retrofit actions to be carried out on buildings, providing estimated spending budgets through consumption and emissions analysis, along with a pre- and post-renovation budget. In particular, Retrofit Recommender is designed to have a clear link to KPIs such as net operating income (NOI), value at risk (VAR), and asset value revaluation, allowing, for example, companies such as Zurich to create a Rex-Fund capable of attracting new investors and capital thanks to a previous top-down analysis - retrofit actions and CapEx of individual buildings - and a bottom-Up one, thus, the study of interventions to significantly achieve portfolio-level decarbonization targets, carried out with the support of the platform.
Click here to check out the article!
