Greenbuild Special Report: Resilience Depends on Data

November 4, 2025

As climate risk information improves, its role grows for CRE companies—and their investors.

Greenbuild sign in LA convention center lobby — Lobby of the LA convention center. Photo by Therese Fitzgerald

Resilience is a key focus of the 2025 Greenbuild conference taking place this week in Los Angeles, and the idea that accurate and precise data is critical to building resilient properties, resilient portfolios and resilient communities permeated the first day’s programming.

During the Sustainability Finance & Investment Forum and a panel on “Building Resilience in CRE,” for example, REIT executives discussed the importance and the complexities of integrating climate risk information into investment and risk mitigation decisions.

One panelis said they are working with their information provider to “unpack” the data they receive, taking time to understand, for instance, what the exposure score means vs. the property damage vs. the business interruption damage and the average annual loss. The panelis described it as learning a “new language” and educating the rest of their business on it.

Thanks to in-depth data, one panelist said, their company is able to quantify the impacts of not only new investments but mitigation efforts as well. Then company can continue to make the investments that have the most impact and minimize the most risk across their portfolio.

While they received climate scores from their data provider, one panelist said their company’s small sustainability department needed more support, so it began relying on its insurance broker because they subscribe to multiple data sources and they have developed their own. “They’re able to narrate those analytics with catastrophic modeling,” the panelist said.

One panelist said their company takes the data they get from third-party information providers and does its own financial modeling based on the data gathered from their “boots-on-the-ground” team.

The next step in that company’s data journey is to get an understanding of “surrounding infrastructure risk” and “chronic risk” (how the company feels about a market) so those insights can be incorporated into the investment strategy.

Now that the Securities & Exchange Commission has backed away from the sweeping disclosure rules that would have applied to public companies, REITs are grappling with how much of their climate risk data they should disseminate.

Further complicating the question, the panelists noted, is that investors are doing their own climate risk analysis on REIT portfolios and that data may show different levels of risk than the companies themselves do.

A panelist said his team likes to point investors to a rebuilding and resiliency project at a property badly damaged by Hurricane Ian—a 350-year event. Through a $12 million rebuilding and resiliency project, the property can now withstand a 500-year event. The case study showed how, for every $1 invested, investors were paid back 24 times.

A panelist agreed that “high-level” portfolio-wide discussions that focus on exposures lack the nuance of specific markets and specific properties. and the mitigation efforts that may have been taken. It is more important for investors to understand the process, they said: How a company uses its data and it mitigates risk.

To counter the problem of investors showing very high risk for markets that the REIT does not show, one of the panelists recommended continued discussions with investors on methodology—why the company does not see high risk where the investor does. It’s important to find a “middle ground,” the panelist said.

It was discussed that, as data rapidly improves, the panelists can look forward to an even deeper understanding of climate risk that combines backwards-looking data about what’s happening in the portfolio and the programs that are being put in place with exposure data.