What data are you collecting?
The Red Book now requires that, as part of our valuation investigations, we should collect and record sustainability and ESG data. It’s considered that these factors are often important in terms of market, societal perception and influence and that the valuer should have ‘proper regard to their relevance and significance’ in relation to valuation.
Beyond our asset valuations, the collection of sustainability data could, of course, have wider benefits in providing key indicators contributing to an authority’s ambitions towards net zero targets.
The RICS published a 3rd edition of the Sustainability and ESG Guidance Note in January last year. The new guidance highlights that, for valuations undertaken for regulated purposes such as financial reporting, the valuer may be required to ‘explicitly articulate the evidential basis for assumptions around sustainability and ESG’. What this highlights, is that some real thought needs to be given to the data we collect so that any valuation judgements about sustainability are appropriately evidenced based.
One of the first questions is of course, ‘what data should we be collecting’?
As part of CIPFA’s Certificate in Asset Valuation, a whole session is now dedicated to sustainability and property valuation. We consider the new Red Book requirements, the guidance notes and insight papers available to us to incorporate those data collection requirements into our work and the implications for our property valuation estimates.
As ever, we are striving to see if we can save our members from the need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and are therefore looking into the possibility of creating a sustainability checklist template for valuation investigations that will in turn be shared with our members. Our starting point is to seek out good practice already in place. If you have already incorporated sustainability into your site investigations, we would love to hear from you. If you are happy to share or discuss, we would be grateful if you could contact Donna Best at donna.best@cipfa.org.