That's why parking management is a building block of any holistic ESG strategy for real estate

Real estate operators, facility managers and also construction managers of corporate real estate projects are increasingly required to incorporate the diverse concerns of sustainability into their work. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that investors and stakeholders are increasingly demanding sustainability aspects, but equally due to the increasing verification and reporting requirements vis-à-vis the regulatory authorities. And last but not least, many players in the industry themselves feel a comprehensive responsibility for the future viability of their real estate (management).

However, the concept of sustainability is difficult to grasp from a business and regulatory perspective. Moreover, it is not always clear what it actually means. All too often, sustainability is reduced to the protection of climate, environment and natural resources. These are certainly supporting pillars, but a contemporary understanding of sustainability encompasses much more. In essence, it is about aligning our actions today in such a way that they will be socially accepted in the long term and produce the desired results. For companies, sustainability therefore means: positioning themselves today in such a way that they will continue to carry out their activities successfully and on a sound basis tomorrow.

This is why the concept of Environmental, Social and Governance, or ESG for short, is increasingly gaining acceptance in the corporate environment. It refers to a set of assessment benchmarks for activities in the core areas of environment, social affairs and corporate governance. The key advantages of the ESG concept are that it expresses a holistic understanding, because social issues and management models also have a major influence on a company's future viability. And the ESG categories can be used to measure and evaluate the sustainability commitment of companies.

Designing Corporate Real Estate Management in a Value-Oriented Way

The fact is that corporate real estate management also needs an overarching ESG strategy. 

The first reason for this is the immense climate relevance of real estate. Buildings and their operation are responsible for 37 percent of all energy-related emissions worldwide and 36 percent of global final energy consumption. This is confirmed by the Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction published annually by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). 

The second reason is the upcoming reporting obligation on the "life cycle assessment" of buildings. The EU has agreed on a Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). It significantly expands the sustainability reporting requirements for companies from 2024. 

Third, banks and investors will most likely translate the reporting requirement into risk premiums if certain ESG criteria are not met. Corporate real estate operators would be strongly affected by this.
In parallel to these external drivers, many real estate operators also pursue ambitious ESG goals on their own initiative. They want their corporate real estate management to be not only value-oriented, but also value-driven.

Numerous ESG aspects can be positively influenced via innovative parking space management

But what is the ESG relevance of buildings and their operation? First and foremost, of course, are the energy efficiency, the absolute energy consumption and the corresponding CO2 emissions. These values are relatively easily available. More and more valid data is also available for the carbon footprint of different building materials.

However, a properly understood ESG strategy reaches much further. It also takes into account "soft" but measurable factors - especially with regard to the concerns of the people who work in a commercially managed building. One such ESG aspect that is still too often neglected is parking on the premises of corporate real estate. This is because innovative parking management has the potential to achieve positive effects in practically all ESG fields of action. One of the prerequisites for this is that parking areas must be managed just as professionally and transparently as the building itself.

parkoneer's solution creates the conditions for both: efficient parking management and profits in the ESG balance sheet. Before we go into these potentials, the parkoneer principle should be briefly explained. It is based on the fact that most existing parking areas are completely underutilized. For example, employees park daily only during working hours, visitors tend to park for a short time on individual days, and during events many guests of a company want to park for the whole day and possibly even the evening. If it is a multi-tenant property, the different frequency of different groups is an additional factor: The customers of retail stores, cinemas and fitness studios, for example, park their cars there at completely different times.

With the parkoneer system, the parking times of these many groups can be precisely coordinated: For example, moviegoers could park in the evening in exactly the same spaces that employees use during the day. This is made possible by an access control system using a camera and license plate recognition: if someone has a parking permit for a certain time, the barrier opens for their vehicle. Third-party parkers are kept out. The parking permits are issued by an administrator within Corporate Real Estate Management. And it does so digitally, without any paperwork. In the future, parkers will be able to book their entry and exit times online themselves.

Read more about the parkoneer principle here.

But how does this dynamic parking management contribute to the ESG criteria and the sustainability balance of real estate operators and companies with real estate? We explain this in detail in the second article on the topic of how ESG strategy and parking management fit together.