The European Public Real Estate Association (EPRA) has launched best practice guidelines for sustainability reporting in a bid to lift standards in this area in the listed sector, Gareth Lewis, EPRA Finance Director, told a press conference on the first day of the annual EPRA conference in London on Thursday.

'Although the listed sector is leading the way compared with the broader real estate sector, around two thirds of listed property companies in the EPRA European index are yet to disclose their sustainability performance. We hope to lift standards in this area in the same way we've encouraged better transparency and established unified performance benchmarks in the industry’s financial reporting.'

The industry body also announced the creation of its Sustainability Reporting Awards which are to be sponsored by Dutch pension fund manager APG with the first results announced at next year's annual meeting in Berlin.

Lewis said that consultation with EPRA members had revealed that one of the main obstacles to uniform reporting on sustainability was the sheer range of data disclosure possible in the real estate sector that make for an extremely confusing situation for both companies and investors. However, with a gradual consensus now emerging on priority key performance indicators, such as greenhouse gas emissions, it had become possible for EPRA to build best practice recommendations (BPR) around these areas of agreement.

The BPR were developed by the EPRA Sustainability Reporting Committee with help from consultants Jones Lang LaSalle. They are comprised of the EPRA Sustainability Performance Measures, which outline the key metrics against which companies should report in terms of absolute (total) performance and intensity of use for: energy, greenhouse gas emissions, water and waste.

Core recommendations within the BPR also cover segmentation by country or asset type, like-for-like analysis and defining landlord and tenant responsibilities and boundaries under different scenarios.