Today, Emmanuel Arsicaud shares his experience of obtaining the SRI label with iQspot.
What is your position and the missions you carry out within Spirit REIM?
I am the director of property management at Spirit REIM Services. I manage a team of 7 people in charge of the tertiary and residential assets. 2 property managers are in charge of the tertiary assets and 3 take care of the residential assets. We also have an accountant and his apprentice who complete this team.
What is Spirit’s CSR strategy? How many of your funds have obtained the SRI label?
For the moment, we have one SRI-labeled fund, the Esprit Pierre Residence fund. Our goal is to quickly label our other funds: Esprit Pierre and Esprit Pierre +. For the future, we want to label each fund we create with the SRI label. It is a very strong marker to obtain this label and we want to show the market our commitment to this strategy.
We are conducting a more global ESG reflection in the management of our assets. We are seeking to set up a more virtuous acquisition and management cycle at all levels. Today, it is essential that we meet the criteria imposed on us, but we want to go further in our approach.
We have the ambition to become greener in order to satisfy the needs of both our investors and our tenant clients. We want to set a good example to our tenants in order to encourage them to have good practices. It is important that this example comes from the top and therefore that the lessor is in this process. Obtaining the SRI label for its funds is a strong indicator of the lessor’s desire to act for more sober real estate.
What are your challenges regarding the SRI label?
The challenge today is to obtain the SRI label for our other funds but above all to make them last. Once the label is obtained, we are audited every year to ensure that we are progressing in our approach or at least that we are implementing actions that will allow progress in the future. It is essential to keep the label in order to maintain a relationship of trust with our investors.
To do this, it is essential that we succeed in raising awareness among our tenants so that they practice the right actions. Today, we alert them when their consumption seems abnormal to us and we try to understand whether this corresponds to usage problems or to the normal nature of their activity in order to find good corrective actions. The prism of reducing energy consumption is only part of this labeling approach but for us, it is very important. Indeed, we particularly highlight it in our SRI valuation and evaluation grid, which explains the importance of our collaboration with iQspot. It’s a win-win for us and the tenants. They lower their energy bills and we increase the value of our building. Everyone wins.
How does iQspot help you with the labeling and certification of your funds and buildings?
For the ISR label, it is essential to have an impact on its buildings and to be able to measure it. iQspot allows us to carry out corrective actions by monitoring consumption, alerts and their advice. We can then easily measure the results of these actions and report them in the audits carried out to obtain and maintain the ISR label.
Concerning the certification of our buildings, all our assets are Breeam in Use certified. We undertook this process before our collaboration with iQspot. However, it is obvious that the solution will greatly facilitate the renewal of the certification.
What is your use of iQspot?
Our goal in using iQspot is, in the first instance, to invoke the notion of win-win. We change the discourse and the relationship between the property manager and his tenant. Today, the property manager is the one who calls the tenant for everything related to the rent. Or, he is the one who is called when a problem occurs in the building.
Here, we are trying to change this relationship. That is to say, we are able to call our tenants ourselves in order to warn them of energy deviations. If no one tells them, they do not realize it and lose money. For example, leaking toilets, heaters left on at the weekend, these are losses of money. And this is how we presented the solution to our tenants. When iQspot came to install the sensors in our various buildings, it was well received by the tenants because they directly perceive the interest of the solution.
Obviously, among these tenants, there are always some who are a little further away from these ecological issues. This is why we decided to provide information on their OPERAT declarations in order to make their task easier. For the most part, they are SMEs or structures that do not have a real estate department, so this solution suited them very well. But some of them have their own CSR department that requires a view of their energy consumption via the iQspot platform.
Thanks to Emmanuel for sharing his experience with us.
