From risk to revenue: insights from our international webinar

On 11 June 2026, CFP Green Buildings hosted the international webinar From risk to revenue: Unlocking real estate value at scale. More than 170 professionals from four continents took part: from financial institutions to asset managers and advisers. Four panellists from ABN AMRO, The Co-operative Bank, Observatoire de l’immobilier durable and ING demonstrated how to translate insights into concrete strategies for your portfolio and your clients. The central question: how do you make the move from risk analysis to strategies that genuinely create value at scale?

Do you want to see more? Watch our 2-minute video recap here. 

Sustainability is no longer a standalone topic. Today, it is woven into everyday decisions about real estate, financing and client relationships. Yet the gap between knowing and doing remains wide. To help bridge that gap, CFP Green Buildings brought together an international panel of experts who work daily at the intersection of sustainability, data and capital. Host Nanda Verschoor (Head of International, CFP Green Buildings) and co-host David Willock (Senior Advisor International, CFP Green Buildings) led an hour of concrete insights, sharp analysis and refreshingly candid reflections from practice. Three themes took centre stage: value, innovation and data.

The gap between A and G is widening

The first theme – value – immediately produced concrete figures. Léon Wijnands, Head of Sustainability at ING Netherlands, pointed to a trend that is clearly visible in the Dutch market: the price difference between properties with an A and a G EPC has grown strongly in recent years and now stands at around 17%. The fact that energy performance is increasingly reflected in real estate value is a positive development.

At the same time, Wijnands struck a critical note: a property with an excellent EPC in a flood-prone area remains extremely vulnerable. Physical climate risks such as foundation damage caused by falling groundwater levels, a significant problem in the Netherlands, are still being systematically underestimated in valuation models.

Juliette Lefébure, Managing Director of the French Observatoire de l’immobilier durable (OID), illustrated how regulation in France is already having a tangible impact on property prices. From 2028, G-rated properties will no longer be permitted for rental. Research shows that G-rated properties are already worth 7 to 15% less than the French average, while A-rated properties command a premium of 4 to 20%. Energy price volatility amplifies this effect: energy-efficient buildings have lower running costs, can support higher rents and attract tenants more easily.

Glenn Bemment, Group Head of Corporate and Commercial Banking at The Co-operative Bank, stressed that sustainability is not a new theme for his organisation, it is part of its core identity. The bank deliberately focuses on sectors where financing can deliver demonstrably positive social outcomes: social housing, renewable energy, healthcare and businesses on a clear ESG transition path. In social housing in particular, the value of retrofitting extends well beyond the building itself: lower energy bills for lower-income residents make a real difference to people’s daily lives.

Caroline Barr, Head of Sustainability Expertise UK at ABN AMRO, added that for her, sustainability is simply a synonym for long-term durability. The location of an asset and how resilient that location is to climate change is a key determining factor. Together with the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, she is working on a model for resilience adjusted credit risk: an approach in which climate adaptation measures are factored in as a positive variable in credit assessments.

Buildings don’t renovate themselves, people do.

The second theme was innovation: what actually works when you want to achieve retrofit at scale? One line from Léon Wijnands stuck with the audience: buildings don’t renovate themselves, people do. And people act on very different motivations than policymakers often assume. ING research shows that 34% of customers renovate because of expected energy savings, 90% because of improved home comfort, and only 10% do it for climate or future generations. That calls for a fundamentally different communication strategy: not “make your home more sustainable”, but “upgrade your home” – just as you experience an upgrade on a flight or in a hotel as an improvement to your own life.

ING puts this insight into practice through the Home Upgrader, a proposition that links sustainability to financial health. Even in a relatively wealthy country like the Netherlands, 47% of households struggle to make ends meet each month. People who are worried about paying their bills are not thinking about solar panels or insulation. ING therefore actively works to improve the financial health of its customers as a precondition for sustainable investment.

ABN AMRO embraces the same people-first thinking in its Better Living pilot. 1,500 homeowners received a concrete proposal: invest in retrofit measures and the monthly energy savings will cover the higher mortgage payments, making the transition budget-neutral. Caroline Barr described how ABN AMRO acts as a full-service provider throughout the process: from an independent energy assessment to a contractor who coordinates all the work. The result? 30% of the customers approached agreed to a conversation, and 50 households are now actively renovating. In absolute terms that may sound modest, but Barr was clear: previous attempts had gone nowhere. This works.

It works because the approach removes three barriers at once: financial uncertainty about the business case, lack of trust in contractors, and the complexity and disruption of a renovation. By addressing all these hurdles in a single proposition, retrofit actually gets off the ground.

The data you want isn’t always the data you need

The third theme was data, and the panel was unanimous: more data is not necessarily better.

Juliette Lefébure shared that OID has quadrupled the number of square metres of buildings for which it holds data over the past five years. That sounds impressive, but as she put it: drowning in data does not lead to better decisions. According to Lefébure, what matters is finding the right level of detail: granular enough to support decisions, simple enough to act on.

Adding to this, physical climate risk indicators are still evolving rapidly. Lefébure urged the audience not to wait for perfect data: climate change won’t wait either. There are already plenty of affordable and proven measures available to improve the resilience of buildings. Use that knowledge now and get to work.

Léon Wijnands highlighted another structural challenge: two banks analysing the same assets can reach entirely different conclusions about physical risks, simply because they use different methodologies. Better standardisation is at least as important as collecting more data. He also called for a more integrated view: not just energy performance and emissions, but social data, biodiversity and water availability all belong in the picture.

Glenn Bemment brought in the client perspective. For mid-sized businesses and social organisations, less is more. One or two KPIs directly linked to cash flow, occupancy or operating costs have more impact than comprehensive ESG dashboards that nobody reads. The value of data lies not in the volume, but in the translation into a conversation that resonates with the client.

The silent insurance gap

During the Q&A, a participant joining from Australia raised an urgent topic: insurability. In Australia, insurers are withdrawing from flood-prone areas, shifting that risk onto the mortgage books of banks. In the United Kingdom, standard mortgage terms run beyond 2039 — the year in which Flood Re, the government-backed scheme that keeps insurance affordable in high-risk areas, is due to wind down.

The gap between the time horizon of insurers and that of banks is a structural risk that is barely visible in credit models today, but is quietly building. Barr therefore called for future insurability to be incorporated as an explicit variable in credit risk assessment, alongside existing probability calculations.

From insight to action

Nanda Verschoor closed the webinar with three takeaways:

• People come first, not buildings. Retrofit only succeeds when you connect with what people genuinely care about: comfort, cost savings, financial security.
• The innovations already exist. They are proven and scalable. Now is the time to roll them out broadly, not to run yet another pilot.
• Don’t wait for perfect data. What’s available is good enough to get started. Collaboration and standardisation are the key to turning individual insights into portfolio-wide decisions.

The knowledge is there, the innovations are proven and the urgency is clear. Now is the moment to act: moving from insight to action, from pilot to portfolio.

CFP Green Buildings works with financial institutions and organisations around the world to drive that movement. Want to find out how you can unlock real estate value at scale? Get in touch.