A partnership of leading global real estate companies including AEW Europe, Allianz Real Estate, AXA Real Estate, GE Capital Real Estate Europe, CBRE Global Investors, KanAm Grund and LaSalle Investment Management, together with Bureau Veritas has been launched in March 2011. Non-for-profit association, the Green Rating Alliance is built on an open architecture and dedicated to improving and monitoring the environmental performance of existing buildings. The aim of the Alliance is to join forces and exchange best practices to bring concrete solutions on sustainability to the property industry, continuously enhancing methodology and tools to adapt to the use of practitioners (owners and occupiers), anticipating future trends and setting tangible and measurable indicators assessed by independent third parties to monitor progress.

Designed by property practitioners for the property sector, Green Rating^TM is a decision-making tool which offers a new approach to assessing and improving the environmental performance of buildings across borders, allowing investors and portfolio managers to maximise the value of their assets and to initiate constructive dialogs with tenants for improvement actions, on a factual basis.

The Green Rating^TM assessments are carried out by carefully selected, accredited and trained consultants from reputed audit firms who perform an efficient third party evaluation of the building.

The methodology consistently assesses the environmental performance of buildings at two separate levels, Intrinsic and Actual. The Intrinsic assessment evaluates the building design and equipment and the Actual assessment evaluates the building according to current activities and operations.

The Intrinsic and Actual performance of a building is assessed against six key environmental criteria. These are; Energy, Carbon and Water, which are assessed by a quantitative process; and Transport, Wellbeing and Waste, which are assessed by a qualitative process.

A key distinctive element of the Green Rating^TM is that assessments also result in practical recommendations for improving the performance of buildings and portfolios through improvement of occupier behavior and management of operations, as well as investments for technical enhancement.

To date the environmental performance of over 4 million m² of European property space in more than 60 cities across 12 countries has already been measured by the Green Rating^TM. With a platform to provide a consistent benchmark on environmental performance of buildings now firmly established, the assessment scheme is available to property owners, occupiers as well as consultants or valuers. Whilst initially, it will work through its existing European network, the Green Rating Alliance will look to expand in the future to other regions such as Asia-Pacific and America.