“With real estate there is always potential for positive social impact”

Delivering positive social and environmental impact remains high on the agenda of many institutional real estate investors. Together with three other real estate managers, Maya Savelkoul, Director Dutch Impact Investments at Bouwinvest, discussed the opportunities and risks that come with social impact investing. “I hope that what is impact investing now will be the market standard in five years.”

The partners of the PERE roundtable discussed several themes, including the measurability of social impact. While benchmarks for the environmental aspects of impact investing are increasingly widely recognised, a shared set of metrics for social impact are still some way off. “It is new, and each investor has their own way of doing it, so it is hard to get everyone aligned on a shared approach to social impact,” Maya said, adding that measurability could mitigate the risk of greenwashing. “Greenwashing or in this case social-washing is a big risk. Merely putting an impact label on a fund is not yet the Holy Grail. It does not lead to a better world.”

Read the full article here.