Full Title: Climate Tech for Real Estate: The Elephant in the Room
Author(s): Stephen Rothstein
Publisher(s): Kleinman Center for Energy Policy
Publication Date: March 16, 2021
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
It is not an exaggeration to suggest that eliminating real estate’s 40% share (EIA Outlook 2017) of global emissions will spawn the most significant technological shift in the history of modern buildings. And yet, this fact is gravely underappreciated by both traditional real estate investors as well as prop-tech investors, the two pools of financial capital that not only have the greatest power to directly catalyze the inevitable transition to net zero buildings, but also to most directly profit from its realization.
And it is not just the investment community that is under-indexing climate tech for buildings in their portfolio of investments or priorities. PWC recently listed the top 13 disrupters to the real estate industry in its annual 2021 Disrupters for Real Estate report. Climate tech for real estate was nowhere on the list (PWC 2021), a tremendous oversight if we consider how rapidly the building decarbonization policy landscape is evolving, how costly it will be to building owners, and how much new venture funding is being raised to hasten the decarbonization transition.