Net zero ready
Oxford Properties
The client:
Oxford Properties is a real estate investor, developer and manager that manages $83.6 billion of assets across four continents.
The task:
Oxford’s commercial real estate portfolio runs to 147 million square feet, spans four continents, and the company intends to bring its emissions to net zero by 2050.
How Oxford tackles the challenge will be watched closely by an industry at the centre of the global push to decarbonise.
Kent Nordic provides consultancy services to Oxford Properties spanning writing, editing and strategic advice. This article is part of a series.
The role:
Content strategy, writing
This article was published on Oxford’s Insights Hub. You can read the article here, or check out a snippet below.
Decarbonizing our portfolio, one building at a time
Bringing the carbon emissions of a single building to net zero is no easy feat.
A lot depends on the types of fuels available for heating and cooling. The equipment used to burn those fuels will impact performance, as will the materials that constitute the building itself. Technology is evolving rapidly, as are regulations, so investors, developers and managers must make decisions with incomplete information. Retrofitting is expensive, and interest rates in western economies are at 16-year highs. That’s before you consider the impact of location, climate, local politics, customer behavior, and more.
At Oxford, we must confront these uncertainties on a very large scale. Our portfolio runs to 147 million square feet, spans 4 continents, and we intend to bring its emissions to net zero by 2050. Setting the target was the easy part. Achieving it will require Oxford to execute a 360-degree approach unlike anything in our company’s 64-year history – one that dovetails the urgency of the task with the needs of our customers and our fiduciary duty to 620,000 OMERS pensioners.
“We’re very much focused on being net zero ready,” says Hala El Akl, Vice President of Sustainable Investing and Operations at Oxford Properties. “The aim is not to do everything all at once; it’s not feasible, it’s not aligned with our fiduciary duty and it’s not good for the planet. It’s about having credible, costed plans in place, and then using our creative minds to make sure it all happens.”
It’s a complex process, but the make-up of our business gives us an advantage. Our end-to-end capabilities as an investor, developer and manager of real estate offer us a broader perspective, as does our presence in many global gateway cities. We try to ensure that information flows between our teams, so those tasked with investing capital understand the needs of customers, or that asset managers in North America can leverage the latest thinking from Europe.
For the past two years, our Sustainable Investing and Operations team has painstakingly conducted audits and gathered datapoints so we can understand the make-up of the carbon emitting from our real estate portfolio. We now have data for 96% of the buildings in our asset-managed portfolio, up from 90% in 2022. These figures are enabling us to accurately forecast how we can decarbonize, building by building.