GIM and CFP Green Buildings make sustainability scalable in Belgium

In a new partnership, GIM and CFP Green Buildings have joined forces to revolutionise the approach to property sustainability. This partnership has led to a new approach to providing high-quality data for real estate in Belgium and the ability to help property owners make their properties more sustainable.

The partnership between CFP and GIM

The story begins with the ambition to make the property sector in Belgium more sustainable. Achieving this ambition required high-quality data to feed CFP’s Green Buildings Tool to get the right sustainability insights. In Belgium, available data sources, including cadastral data, vary in quality and regional specificity.

This is how we discovered Belmap – GIM’s 3D digital twin of the built environment that provides a complete understanding of building characteristics for the entire Benelux region.

An initial in-depth test confirmed that the data and quality level were exactly what was needed. By integrating Belmap’s data into the Green Buildings Tool, even less data are now needed from property financiers and owners to provide them with accurate sustainability advice, including a business case.

How can these data help banks and lenders?

Having the right data is indispensable when it comes to making buildings more sustainable. Data are crucial – not just for making a business case for sustainability, but also for preparing reports and assessing risks. Nanda Verschoor, Head of International Operations at CFP Green Buildings: ‘With the right data, you can quickly and easily create a tailored sustainability report: from an individual building to an entire portfolio. This way, you can focus on ESG or financial savings achieved, or on PCAF or CRREM. By integrating Belmap into the Green Buildings Tool, we can quickly provide banks and other customers with the right insights and data.’ Bart Thomas from GIM adds: ‘Data quality is key to our integrated vision and approach. We combine more than 60 high-quality sources in Belmap, with location data from partners as well as insights derived from algorithms developed in-house. What’s more, we always communicate transparently to our customers about data quality through the available reliability indicators. This makes Belmap a valuable data source for insurers, but also for financiers.’

Quick insight into the right sustainable steps

Belmap’s integration with the Green Buildings Tool offers a user-friendly solution for investors looking to make their portfolio more sustainable.

Customers can quickly gain insight into the condition of their properties, available opportunities, expected returns and valuations of sustainable investments. This saves them the trouble of collecting a great deal of data themselves, such as the surface area of the property.

It results in a better user experience and greater ease of use, allowing customers to focus on taking sustainable steps without having to delve into complex data analysis.

The future of the partnership

The future looks promising for GIM and CFP Green Buildings. Bart: ‘Together with CFP, we aim to serve a large part of the banking sector in Belgium and refine the models using the extensive Belmap data. Moreover, we intend to extend this service to other sectors and applications, such as insurance, heat networks and local authorities.’

These ambitions align seamlessly with CFP Green Buildings’ ambitions. Nanda: ‘CFP operates in 26 countries, and more and more countries are being added to the Green Buildings Tool. That means we are constantly expanding the data, with our goal of a digital twin for every building in the world.’

The partnership between GIM and CFP Green Buildings promises a sustainable future for property owners and a significant contribution to making the property sector more sustainable in Belgium and beyond.