measurabl in action
Helping Boston Properties
Boston Properties (BXP) is a publicly-traded real estate investment trust with approximately 50 million square feet of property in Boston, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and DC. BXP uses Measurabl to help their entire team — from boiler room to boardroom — stay agile to get quick wins in sustainability practices.
MEASURE WHAT MATTERS
As one of the largest owners of Class A office properties in the United States, Boston Properties is always seeking new ideas that give them the competitive edge. “I want to be open to new ideas and technologies,” states Ben Myers, Director of Sustainability. “That’s my number one challenge.” So when Myers attended a sustainability peer group for Nareit (National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts) and first heard about Measurabl, he took notice.
Measurabl presented an opportunity for BXP to dig deep into their ESG data completeness in much the same way they look at their financial data. Here was a software that could collect and quantify sustainability efforts and turn it into a reporting tool that communicated asset performance to stakeholders. Myers was in.
Onboarding for Boston Properties was simple — they were already accumulating their utility data. It was just a matter of importing it into the Measurabl platform. From there, the sustainability team hit the ground running. The Measurabl interface was so simple that the staff felt comfortable updating their data, and a few proactively created their own dashboards to analyze their regional performance.
As a result, whenever Myers went into his dashboard to view portfolio performance, he knew he was working with a complete and current data set. If he saw gaps or anomalies, it was due to a building performance issue he could investigate. Through Measurabl, he could easily engage with teams to figure out the root of the issue.
In the first year BXP used Measurabl, Myers refined key performance indicators a month ahead of schedule.
OPPORTUNITY IS EVERYWHERE
Award-Winning Ambitions
With Measurabl, not only is Boston Properties’s sustainability reporting the best it’s ever been, their ESG data is also investment-grade. They have a verified and audited set of sustainability performance indicators to withstand a similar scrutiny to which their financial information is subject. With confidence in their data quality, their ambitions are only escalating.
“We are in, perhaps, the most exciting time for any sustainability real estate practitioner to be in the industry,” says Myers. “There’s so much opportunity everywhere you look, everything we touch, there’s the ability to improve upon what we’ve been doing.”
In the last five years, BXP has invested $25 million in energy conservation, generating a 24% rate of return for their stakeholders. And in 2019, Myers received Nareit’s Leader in the Light Leadership Personified Award. Inspired by what others in the industry are doing, Myers hopes to synthesize ideas from the ESG community to accomplish long-term ambitions for Boston Properties.