Glossary

GRESB

Also known as: Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark, GRESB

An investor-driven benchmark that annually assesses the ESG performance of real estate funds, companies, and infrastructure portfolios, producing comparative scores used by institutional investors in capital allocation and manager due diligence.

Unlike LEED or BREEAM, which certify individual buildings, GRESB (Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark) operates at the entity or fund level, aggregating portfolio-wide data on energy, water, waste, emissions, and governance practices submitted annually by participating managers. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other large limited partners increasingly require GRESB participation — and reference GRESB quintile rankings — as part of manager selection and ongoing monitoring, making a strong GRESB score a meaningful factor in capital-raising for private real estate funds. A common misconception is that GRESB measures individual asset 'greenness'; in practice it evaluates management systems, data quality, and reporting maturity across an entire portfolio, so a fund can score well even with a mix of certified and uncertified buildings if its ESG governance and data collection are robust.