Winters + Winters discuss GRESB ft. Michelle Winters, Dan Winters, & Cass McFadden

Speaker A: Foreign. Hi, everyone. Welcome to season five, episode seven of the ESG Experience. The, uh, podcast about all things ESG and beyond. In case you're wondering why Healy Love isn't doing the introduction like she usually does, today we're doing a special segment called Winters and Winters. Um, this features myself. So Michelle Winters from Conservice, as well as Dan Winters, no relation, I promise. Um, from Grez, as well as a special guest. So, um, before we kind of get into all of that, Dan, thanks again for joining us. Um, can you give our listeners just a brief introduction on what you do for Grez?

Speaker B: Uh, Michelle, always great to do another Winters and Winters podcast together. Um, so. Hi, everybody. I'm Dan Winters. I'm senior director at Grez. Uh, Grez. We were started in 2009. We're celebrating our 15th anniversary this year. It's going to be a really big deal. On October 1st, we've got an event in New York City. 15 years of industry progress. And so we were started by a handful of institutional investors that have grown to now encompass over 150. These are the big pension funds and sovereign wealth funds and the big pools of capital out there that are putting their money to work, uh, to pay for the pensions that they're obligated to do so, and they want to do this, um, with the best risk adjusted returns and driving progress within the industry. So I think those are the things that we're going to talk about today, particularly when it comes to sustainability.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited about it. Um, and then for those of you that aren't as familiar with me. So again, Michelle Winters, I'm VP of ESG Sales and Solutions here at Conservice. Um, I've been part of Conservice, previously known as Gobi, since 2012. Um, which to do math seems kind of crazy to me sometimes. Um, but I've had a couple different roles here. Um, all the way from account management to strategic consulting, um, to business development. And so that's kind of the background that I'll bring. And, um, everyone should be familiar with our team. But, uh, Kinservice does a lot of utility bill management, esg, strategic consulting and software services. Um, so that's who we are. And we're very excited today to be joined by Cass McFadden. Um, so she's vice president, global head of sustainability for Cortland. Probably needs no introduction, but I'm going to do it anyways. Um, so for those of you not familiar with Cortland, it's a vertically Integrated multifamily real estate investment development and management firm headquartered out of Atlanta, Georgia. She oversees the development, integration of sustainability and ESG strategies for her firm's assets across the Sun Belt and into the Mountain west states as well as in the uk. Prior to joining Cortland, Cass served as the Vice President of Sustainability for Busuto, led energy management for public REIT at One Bay, and worked in energy industry as a regulatory professional. So we're really excited to have her. And then really quickly before we get started, a little bit of a preview. Um, in today's episode, we're going to be exploring how Grez has really adapted into different emerging trends and sustainability for companies like Cortland and improvements they've seen within their GREZ scores and how they've gone about doing that. Um, Cass is going to share some of those insights into their approach M over the last two years and strategies that led to improvements and those results in the overall ESG strategy. Uh, we're also going to discuss how GREZ is reporting and kind of using that to engage with different stakeholders. Um, and then we'll also talk about some comprehensive discussion on the role of GREZ and driving sustainable practices, um, that companies can continue to leverage. So a lot, but really just a great conversation. So, Cass, welcome. Happy to have you.

Speaker C: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Speaker A: Should be a fun discussion and I'm personally looking forward to hearing a little bit on what Cortland has, um, done and progressed. And I realized today when we were first starting our conversation that it's only been two years that you've even submitted for grz, which blows my mind. So looking forward to, ah, hearing about those approaches as it relates to Grasp and your overall ESG strategy. Um, but I know a couple of the initial topics were related to GREZ scoring, which Dan always hates when I bring up GREZ scores in particular because it's part of the bigger picture. But Dan, let us know if you don't mind. Start us off with when we talk about GREZ scores. Uh, what does that even mean? I know there's scores, there's peer rankings, there's these stars, um, for newbies to grez. Do you mind describing that briefly for us?

Speaker B: Sure. Well, let's. First off, let's get the audience grounded on Grez. So GREZ is a portfolio level assessment. I think that's the number one thing that people need to really ground themselves in. A portfolio is either a private equity fund or a listed reit. And the idea is the vast majority of these portfolios have what I like to call random acts of sustainability happening. And I'm rather confident that the folks that are tuning in should be familiar with a LEED building or an energy star building. Right. They're in most downtowns in the United States. And so those are the building level sustainability signals that are out there. A certification or a rating. So Grez is above that. It's about the portfolio. And the idea is to have a program to do those sorts of things with all your buildings. So to do that we've created a framework. And this framework has some um, points and it's based upon peer benchmarking. So it's 0 to 100 points and it's broken up into components. There's a management component and there's a performance component. The management are policies and procedures and action plans that really showcase a well run, thoughtful approach to sustainability by a company. That those things are policies and procedures and data management systems and things that folks often have but sometimes either aren't written down, but once they do write it down as a policy, then they start to implement the policy. So the management component of grasp makes up those kind of what I'm going to call some soft management, uh, components, if you will, uh, elements, 30 points. The performance side, 70 points. So that's really where the juice is. So ultimately, out of 0 to 100 score, um, people do, uh, you know, they, they, they do grasp. They will. In our annual rhythm on April 1st, we have a portal that opens. On July 1st, it closes. We set another record this year. Over 2200 portfolio submissions came in. And in just a couple days those results, the preliminary results will be known. And uh, that is when people open up their benchmark reports and see a score from 0 to 100, they will see peer rankings. And the peer groups are based upon the property type that dominates the portfolio and the geographic location that it is. So an office portfolio in the United States by a listed REIT will be peered up against other listed office REITs in the United States. Assuming we have six, we need a minimum of six. We don't have six. We'll bring it up and we'll bring some Canadian portfolios in. We might have to go up globally, but either way that's how peer groups are determined. And then we will rank firms based upon how their score compares to others that look like them. And then the last component is a star component, one to five stars. What's interesting about this is that they're mathematical. So 20%, you know, so there's five stars 20% per quadrant. Quintile. Quintile. Excuse me. And so this means that 20% of the groups are going to receive a five star this year. And it's gotten uber competitive. And so the differentiation between those firms, they're all kind of vying for, you know, uh, to be at the top of the range and did takes about a good 85, 86. I don't know what the cutoff is because we haven't, you know, the benchmark reports are final and the scores are final as of October 1st. So I'm kind of guessing, but we're looking at a score of 85 or 86 generally to get up to a five star. The flip side of this also means that the folks that are starting their journey might end up in the bottom and you're going to receive a one star. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It just shows where you are in the universe within all of the folks that have been doing gresm.

Speaker A: Well, and I think it's important to note too, let's say you make improvements from year one to year two, but if your peers are also making improvements from year one to year two, it may not be reflected in stars. It may not be reflected in your peer ranking. Theoretically might in your score though, right, Dan? Am I thinking about that? Right?

Speaker B: Yeah. So the score will. So what I observe are the behavioral economics behind gresp. People step forward and they submit to the benchmark, uh, and they receive the score and it brings some tension. They receive something that might be not as high as they would have hoped.

Speaker A: And that's how Dan calls it, tension.

Speaker C: That's probably really.

Speaker B: Oh, uh, well, so Michelle, I've been at this for a long time and so I get to go to all the meetings in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, around the world where, where people are like, oh man, our grasp score, it really wasn't that great this year. I said, well, that's good news because now you know where you stand. And then people honestly, they start to get excited and they will start to talk about all the things that they have planned for this year and for next year. So what I observe is a three year sort of journey, right? The first year you get in and you figure out what you don't know and you get outside the four walls of your organization and you see, wow, there's a lot of sustainability that's happening out there, particularly my peers. And look, we're all competitive. We all want to be top. We just had the Olympics not long ago. We saw gold, silver, Bronze. So this brings the tension. And then the next year, year two, typically there's a pretty big score jump and that, you know, kind of, oh, uh, we're not doing so well. Kind of the glum, um, turns into, hey, this is great, I love esg. Look at how the great things that we've done in the past year showed up in our grasp score. And here's what we're going to do next year to make it even better. And I tell you that story because it's true. Private equity firm after private equity firm after reit that it's this first three years, you know, what you don't know, you put some things in place, you see some improvement, and you're really off to the races. And things really start to click in that third year.

Speaker A: Well, and I think that's a good segue into CAS in particular because you guys did have a nice, um, increase in your score from one year prior to the next. And I just seen to all of the things that the Cortland team has continued to implement and align with your overall ESG strategy. Um, but that had to feel good kind of going into those improvements and hopefully we'll have even more with the coming out results here at this October. But, um, Cass, I would love to hear about your team in particular and how your approach to GREZ has continued to evolve over the last two years that might have led to some of that score impact.

Speaker C: We'll say. Yeah, absolutely. So I actually joined Cortland about two years ago. Um, and we actually did have GREZ reporting prior to then, but those were, uh, sort of the baby steps. There was a year or two of, you know, sort of the blind reporting year and figuring out what is grez, what are all of the indicators and requirements and really, you know, how are we going to integrate this into the organization. So when I joined UM in a new sort of global strategic role, we had an opportunity to notice some things pretty immediately. One was, after talking to the departments and different leaders was that we weren't fully capturing all of the points that we kind of felt like we could, um, in the reporting schematics. And so I thought that was sort of an easy win. I'm glad we dialed that in right away because often organizations that, um, don't really report to global frameworks or any kind of guidelines that are out there, they don't really know how to translate that language internally and vice versa. So we were able to find that we actually did have certain policies or setups or procedures, et cetera. That uh, we should include in our GRES reporting to get those points. Um, and then another thing that we noticed pretty quickly was you could get some points based on your strategic focus. And so not everything is immediately it uh, is performance based. You know, as dan said, about 7% of your points are going to be performance based and a lot of that can relate to data. But there are questions around procedures and so we had to work very quickly to say is this something we really do if it's official, can we codify it, et cetera. And then now let's include that in our again in our GREZ reporting. So again early wins. I think that was really exciting. Um, but ultimately what we are targeting moving forward, it's very specifically how do we improve in the E category. So we're thinking energy, water waste certifications, uh, really telling our climate story. You know, we're thinking about long term transition. Um, and so as we think about those again there are indicators that are, that give you the guidance and GREZB is very important to us because currently it is our centralized ESG scorecard. Right. It's the one that, that um, is going to tell the world how we're doing in esg. And our investors care very much about how we're performing in this category. Um, and they understand that to date we are pretty tapped out, um, in scores. I know we've kind of talked about this before, uh, not part of this podcast, but in the social governance categories overall in management, uh, we've done all of the internal due diligence to get us to a place where we're ready to tackle performance. But now it's a matter of what is going to be the programmatic rollout to actually help us perform better in the E category.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I personally find too across customers that especially on the more management side, there's a lot of things you might have in place already but that haven't been articulated or presented in a way that can be either aligned with a framework like GRAs were distributed to external and internal stakeholders. And so formalizing some of that I think has a lot of benefits as well. Um, and then also potentially uh, improving them so to speak and kind of seeing what other frameworks like Grasp and others that are out there might recommend to include within those kind of internal initiatives. So I always find that interesting. Um, but yeah, the performance section is almost everyone's challenge and especially when you have different property types, they can be more challenging than others. If you have a lot of properties that are in UM City which Cities which have benchmarking or maybe class A office buildings or they control the utilities, it's much easier. Um, for those that don't, um, there's kind of extra challenges there and, and I appreciate it as well. Kind of utilizing those building certifications as another means of engaging with the properties and getting access to data and kind of showcasing the building improvements that are taking place. Kind of all fall under that E category. Um, I'd be curious to know, can you just expand on that a little bit more? Like what specifics are you guys looking at on that performance site? So I heard the certifications, are there other specific strategies on the performance end that you're excited about kind of going after that data?

Speaker C: Absolutely. So with energy, you know, energy efficiency is top of mind and so we very quickly had to do sort of a reassessment or an audit, um, of how our communities are doing and where there might be, ah, low hanging fruit. So you know, you think about LED retrofits, um, do you have thermostats in the right places and do you have standards of excellence around those thermostats to uh, make sure that you're controlling temperature in your building? Um, we've had conversations internally about what else can we do around design to make the building more efficient so that we're not just relying on the retrofits and thermostats or any sort of, you know, maybe H vac turnover, etc. Um, because there's a lot that also goes into the maintenance component. I think people kind of forget that your ongoing maintenance is a big part of your energy efficiency picture and making sure that you have an understanding of what is the optimal equipment. Right. And um, how you can maybe get optimal pricing via vendors, etc. So I won't go too down the rabbit hole, but there's a lot in that picture. So we wanted to know what was left to do essentially. And now we have this long list with these audits to say we now need to build this into strategy, which means building it into budgeting and who is going to get it done internally. Right. So, um, I think that's helped us really evaluate do we have the existing sort of personnel structure etc. To, to get this done and how quickly. Right. Um, ideally you'd love to get it done in one year and dramatically improve your score. But, um, you might have to, especially with the changing environment landscape right now with real estate, you might have to plan it out a little differently, um, amongst your communities and your departmental leads, um, in the water category. It's the same thing. It's evaluating where the gaps are. Um, do we have the current technology on site to make sure that sprinklers aren't going off when it's raining or to make sure that we're, are we working with our landscaping and design teams to think of native landscape so that we're incorporating drought intolerant plants? You know, things like that. It gets really granular. But that is how we're going to tackle the reduction. You know, we don't want there to be leaks. And so, um, do we have a process for that? Whether it's someone catching it internally, our residents reporting it, et cetera. So, um, we have been really, I think, surgical about do we have the technology, do we have the personnel and procedures? And the same amount of energy is applied to waste as well. Everything starts with an audit and a true understanding of your on site characteristics. Are there diversion programs that are running? Um, are they actually getting the job done? You know, what do the diversion metrics look like? Um, but then another major concern is are we still successfully establishing the double materiality? And what I mean by that is, um, and I know Dan will appreciate this because Grez is not all about points, my friends. Uh, it's really about how is it helping your business mature and meet its bottom line. So the nice thing about achieving reductions in energy, water, and, you know, all of the waste metrics is you should be able to reach a cost savings and improved noi, et cetera. And the ESG market has matured not only in what's being required, maybe on the reporting side or the guidance as to how you can best facilitate this in your organization, but there are vendors, suppliers, partners out there who have also gotten a lot smarter. And if you are able to not only get it right internally, but partner with the right folks, you can now achieve that positive double materiality. So, so you're reducing your consumption, but you might also be reducing the expense. And for me as a practitioner, that's the real win when I can show my organization, my leaders, peers, uh, in the market that we are hitting all of those points. So that's really where our focus has been. And then all of this is facilitating the sort of the climate picture, right? We're all trying to do better. We're all technically in this together when it comes to, uh, more positive climate impacts. And so, uh, for us, what that has looked like is maturing our climate risk assessment. Um, and we are working even to this day on better incorporating that into our investments. Due diligence process. So multifaceted for sure. But I think, um, the nice thing about E and performance is there is that double materiality.

Speaker B: Michelle, what I love about what Cass just said is, is that this conversation is happening. And it's not just happening at this building over here or that building over there. It's happening within the firm. They're looking at all of the buildings. And it's important to recognize that this conversation is now happening 2,200 plus times because that's how many portfolios submitted to the benchmark this year. So this is true industry change, organizational change, and we just happen to do this point thing to move folks along. But by the way, Grez, business static, it will change too, over time. It's meant to be the, the North Star for the, the industry. And so last year we introduced a question. It wasn't scored, but it was introduced. Do you have a, uh, greenhouse gas emission reduction target? I am confident you have an IRR target. I am m confident there are financial targets, but having non financial targets. Ooh, right. So now this spins up a conversation internally. Should we, could we. How would we, how would we implement this? And so we put this out there and it's not scored in 2024, but it will be in 2025. Puts people on notice.

Speaker A: Well, that's honestly one of my favorite things about grasp over the last. What, what was the number of years you said at the beginning of this? 2009, which is crazy to think about. Um, but that is, uh, an element of grasp, I think is super impactful for participants, is it opens up those conversations, it opens up feedback as part of the process from your industry peers in a way that can be, for the most part, organized fairly well and kind of categorized in ways that makes it also easier to communicate with other stakeholders. I find a lot of times investors might. And Cas, I think you mentioned that, you know, it's a, a way for you to communicate with your investors. They look at those scores, they look at what you're providing. I don't want to call it the easy button for investors, but they can look at a portfolio that's aligned with Grez and know that, okay, I, I see at a minimum you're asking these questions internally that you're kind of staying up to, up to date with the changing landscape as it relates to risk. I always take ESG back to risk and whether that be the climate risk cast that you mentioned or kind of the internal risk. Um, so I love that Dan and I have always appreciated that With Grez, and with that, I guess I'll even ask you. I know we're getting off scores. I hate talking about scores because we hate sometimes too. Every once in a while, what is it, Dan? Every like three to five years, Grez throws this curveball and it sends me and my team into 20 different conversations of explaining that Grez continues to change and that's okay. Are we expecting another large shift with Grez's roadmap and their questions and scoring and communication?

Speaker B: Let's go backwards. What you're describing is the 2020, right? Not only do we have a pandemic, but we've made a major structural change to GREZ. We told the market this was happening in 2018. That structural change was mandating energy, water waste and GHG emission data for every asset within the portfolio. Every asset. You couldn't just give one single fat number that says, here's what we think is in the portfolio. Clearly there was some sort of method, and I'm going to call it a spreadsheet that was used to come up with that number. So in 2018, we said, okay, we need to have some more discipline behind this. And we started to put the procedures in place from our framework to allow the industry to be in a good position to do finance. Emissions, tenant control, landlord control. That's exactly what PCAF is looking for to understand, uh, scope one, scope two, scope three, and allow an LP institutional investor to determine their finance emissions. The only way that we could do that was to make that change. But when we did that, scores dropped significantly, creating this dynamic of having to explain, well, what happened this past year. Oh my gosh, the score went down, but the next year the scores rebounded pretty well, right? People were able to divulge energy, water, waste and GHG emission data, not necessarily for the entire portfolio, but they started to fill up that bucket. And the reason why we did this is we believe that the market will come up with the solutions. So green lease leaders putting green lease components in there, getting rights to that consumption data doesn't happen overnight. It takes an entire cycle of new leases to roll over. Right? But once that happens, the mechanisms are in place to acquire this data. Others went after shadow metering. How do we, uh, whatever we need to do to acquire the data. Some folks are out there taking pictures of meters, whatever we need to do, because investors invest in buildings, they don't invest that are contract called leases. But nonetheless, they want to understand, is this building good, better, best? Is this building aligned with the Paris Agreement, going towards a net zero by 2050. Where are we? The only way to do that is with data.

Speaker A: And I truly think it's definitely pushed the market forward and we've adapted and I think it forces other partners and providers and the utilities, um, to do so. And honestly I think it's setting us up or set up the industry for success with the change in jurisdiction requirements. Right. So it's like, yes, you're forcing everyone to go after that asset level data, but guess what? Now we have more ordinance benchmarking requirements, we have building performance standard requirements. We've just kind of continued to push that market ahead and now more utilities are making the data available. So it's all. I remember you talked about lead at the very beginning. That's what I did way back 15 years ago. I would do lead projects and I remember calling and asking for like recycled content and material and the vendors would look at me like I was nuts. Now it's in every single like material cut sheet that you get. So it's just about changing that landscape and um, I personally appreciate it.

Speaker B: So that 2020 M change has led to us here in 2024 to be more sophisticated, to be able to do financed emissions or you know, be in position anyway. So you asked the question, what changes are on the horizon? There's been some desire to have some clarification about renewable energy. The question, quality, where it's coming from. Right. Embodied carbon. And then the big other sort of structural change that's happening within GREs is there is a difference between the buildings that we work in. Call it an office or shop in or might do an um, you know, entertainment in versus where we sleep at night. Residential. Right. Different concepts when it comes to sustainability, ESG and whatnot. So we've broken out and into a residential oriented, um, I'm going to call it a module, for lack of better words. You know, some, some things that are a little bit more material to the residential sector. And we're going to be rolling that out in 2025, which I think will be music to Cass's ears.

Speaker C: I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker A: Well, I love that and I think, you know, as we maybe start to kind of think more to that future ahead and that what that roadmap looks like, I'd love to hear Cass, just in general you mentioned a little bit, but if you don't mind expanding on it, what, what are your looking forward goals and maybe where does grads play a part and um, you know, how do you, how do you continue to build that success that you guys are continuing to see and keep it moving forward. Um, and those trends that maybe you're

Speaker C: excited about, you know, our goal, even though we tried to get away from the scores conversation, uh, we do want to increase our score. We do want to increase our stars and continue to rank high, you know, in peer rankings. And we say this because of something that Dan referenced earlier, that, you know, this is a moving target. But I think, you know, practitioners sometimes can get frustrated by that saying, I don't really understand like where the goal post is. I don't understand how to be successful. And I don't think that that's always. That's not the case with Grez. You know, there are clear guidelines as to what the broader needs are in the market from a climate perspective, from a, almost a very scientific perspective. And all of the guidelines give you tools to help you be successful, not just in the performance category, but almost in how you're, you're very thoughtful about de risking within your organization. So, um, I think it's a, it's a noble and worthy goal to want to score better. Um, as long as you feel like you have a positive relationship with Grez and a good understanding of the why, like why the GREZ indicators are there, why some of the questions might seem like they're, you know, almost leading to different categories that can have points. It's because as all of our knowledge in the market evolves as to what's needed, um, so too does GREZ evolve and so too does your business evolve aligned with gresp. So, you know, as it relates to overall ESG strategy, we're preparing right now to commit to um, emissions reductions targets. That's not something that we've done to date. Um, because for those, I mean, there might be practitioners listening in that already know, but it takes some baby steps to get there. You need to understand your GHG profile. You really need to lean on the internal integration and make sure your teams are ready. Um, I always say, you know, don't go into a closet and quietly sign yourself up for UMPRI or anything like that, because your organization needs to know what it's going to take to be successful. Um, so that's a major piece ah of movement for us moving forward so that we can align with global Net zero standards, uh, for data performance. Again, we're targeting further reductions in the energy, water and waste categories because of that double materiality. Um, and while we're currently scoring well, I would say more in the S and G categories or overall management. Again, To Dan's point, there's going to be constant evolution. I mean not to get too granular, but we noticed a change in sort uh, of personnel who might be responsible for ESG activities. Right. And now we're moving towards those who have financial consequences versus just non financial consequences. I mean that's, that's material and it's going to change the way uh, that person does their job around esg, which hopefully facilitates a better outcome. So we're paying attention to the changes. I think we need to remain a student to the game, but that's really the goal, to continue to do well. Um, and even if we're not necessarily five star tomorrow, we want to see a consistent increase annually. Let me.

Speaker B: Can I build on that for just a second? Because some interesting points were brought up here. GREZB is a series of best practices that are curated from around the globe. And we have uh, the GREZ foundation is what owns the ip, it's what owns the standard and it's governed by the industry. So we have LPs, the big pension plans and institutional investors. They make up the board and they're the ones that vote yes or no on any changes that are going to happen with the assessment in years forward. Those changes are recommended by a group called the Standards Committee that are made up of folks from the private equity firms and the REITs focused on real estate. We also do this for infrastructure. So that's a separate committee. Either way, that's where this is coming from. I mean if I could be king for a day, I would certainly come up with some ideas and things and schemes within grez, but I can't do that. It needs to go through the foundation. So every indicator, the way it's set up within GREZ is a Boolean concept. Do you do this thing, whatever it is, do you have an environmental, uh, management system, right, to track all this data, yes or no? And then once you answer yes, hopefully you can answer yes. Then what good, better and best look like start to show up as nested answers within that yes that you've answered. So the idea is to propel the industry forward to have people talk about something. Do we have this thing? Do we have a science based target? Do we have first off, do we have a net zero target? Yes or no? Hm.

Speaker C: Should we?

Speaker B: Could we? It usually takes about a year for internal conversations about that. So once you decide to go down that road, what does it mean? Is it an absolute target? Is a relative target? Is it a reduction by 2030? Is it science based that starts to sound like good, better, best. And that's exactly what Grez promotes and drives in the industry globally.

Speaker A: Well, with that good, better, best, Dan, maybe as, uh, we wrap up here, what are some of those good, better, best trends, maybe that you're seeing in this space and how Grez might kind of focus on some of that into their future questions or assessment information?

Speaker B: Well, so on the, on the participation trend, we are seeing a lot more value added opportunistic funds. So it's not just a core game, right? The value add, an opportunistic. They have some challenges with how fast buildings and assets come in and out of a fund, but nonetheless they also have the most, um, opportunity to drive some change because typically there's a rehab or releasing component or something happening to put it into this sort of higher return bucket, if you will, this strategy value add or opportunistic. So seeing that's where the growth is. There's also a lot of growth on the residential side from a property sector. So that's been interesting to see. We're seeing single family home, residential, uh, portfolios. And conservas has been a big driver of that conversation. So a lot of those are coming in. Embodied carbon is a conversation that is really moving forward. So trying to count carbon is, you know, that's what we want to do from a consumption GHG from an operational standpoint. But also understand, and Michelle, you brought this point up earlier about the, you know, what's in the materials but what's in the building and how much carbon is in that building is something that people want to know. And then the last thing, biodiversity, right. It's out there. People are concerned about habitat, how you measure and manage. That is certainly a conversation that we're, uh, very involved in. And we want to insert a question or two along the way that bring this into the conversations that are happening within all these sophisticated firms. That's the idea.

Speaker A: I like it. I like where we're going, I like where we've been. Maybe are good ways to kind of think about it. And I genuinely appreciate, um, Dan, everything that Grez was doing and how they continue to push that conversation. And with Cass specifically in your team and how engaged you guys are and really focusing it back to that level of materiality. I couldn't agree more. Um, so this was great. Any other thoughts or comments to close us out? Crew?

Speaker B: Keep up the great work. It takes everybody. We're all pushing it together. And you know, as much as we do scores, ranks and ratings, there's a colleague of ours, Jill Rozig, at Harrison street, and she says you can't win esg. We only win if we all win. So let's keep it up.

Speaker A: I love it. Well, thank you so much. Um, for both of you joining us today on our podcast, um, this has been another episode episode of that ESG experience. So thank you everyone, for listening. If you enjoyed your time with us, make sure to subscribe to your favorite podcast directory. There's a new episode every month. Thanks to our loyal subscribers for continuing to support our podcast and want to continue the conversation between episodes. Follow us on your favorite social media channel at esuexperience.

Speaker C: Awesome.

Speaker A: Thanks, guys.

Speaker B: Thank you, Michelle. Thank you,

Speaker C: Ra.