The Added Value of TIC Companies for Real Estate Sustainability

Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important aspect of the real estate industry. Tenants and investors are asking for buildings that are more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. Governments are also putting rules in place to make buildings more sustainable.

The real estate sector is a major contributor to global warming. Buildings are responsible for 37% of global carbon emissions and 34% of the worlds' energy demand. Other effects of buildings include resource depletion, air, water, and land pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

Companies from testing, inspection, and certification (TIC) play a key role in supporting the real estate industry achieve sustainable goals. TüV SüD as global TIC provider offers tailored services to ensure the safety, quality, and compliance of buildings and infrastructure projects. These offerings aid achieving sustainability, business, and investment goals for the building industry using state of the art digital technologies. ?

Benefits of working with TIC Companies

As environmental, social and governance considerations become commoditised, properties that do not meet the new sustainability standards may be disadvantaged in the marketplace. A sustainability assessment and rating framework can help create a more sustainable living and working environment, while lowering maintenance expenses and increasing the long-term worth of the building and its assets via possible environmental, social, and governance (ESG)-based investment.

This holistic life-cycle approach to the sector, even before planning begins, to lay the financial groundwork for the current and future perspective. It provides a pathway for optimizing planning standards and regulations compliance, including sustainability. It also provides the necessary data foundation to ensure transparency for relevant?

Solutions from TüV SüD as a global TIC Company

It is a well-established fact that 85 to 95% of today's existing buildings will still exist in 2050. The construction industry exhibits a high degree of individuality, varying in terms of technical condition or project-related size and complexity.?With this in mind, data availability is important for building physics and managing energy, water, and waste. It is therefore not feasible to adopt conventional methods, but to consider innovative approaches for each individual endeavour.

TüV SüD has a profound understanding of the engineering disciplines in the real estate sector, including civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering. Its operational role includes design review, quality management of processes, and construction itself. TüV SüD employs existing expertise and innovative technologies, to transform complex situations into a transparent approach that demonstrates the clients' commitment to reducing their carbon footprint.?

For example, TüV SüD’s Technical Monitoring Service is integrated into a building automation system to extract raw data for secure transfer to TüV SüD experts for analysis. The user is provided with a continuous monitoring of their property over a dashboard and benchmarking of the single components by setting rules against initial design and common practice. This monitoring will easily identify 'low-hanging fruit' that will make a big difference. As part of the overall assessment strategy, these changes will also help future investments in retrofit methods like upgrading fa?ade elements, building automation, and PV systems.

As a digital backbone, Technical Monitoring is the entry point to continuous ESG reporting. Digital data already collected can be used to look at buildings together with the building physics and make concrete decisions about how to improve them. This can also be used to classify assets based on the CRREM trend (Carbon Risk Real Estate Monitor).

Leading by Example: TüV SüD’s Singapore HQ Building

TüV SüD's 18,900 m2 headquarters in Singapore is one of our many global examples. Using simulations based on Building Information Modelling (BIM), the design review has already led to an increase in energy efficiency of about 50% compared to the previous building. During the design phase of the project, continuous quality and risk checks were implemented to guarantee the BIM model's performance and ensure that potential conflicts are identified immediately. This enabled project participants to resolve issues before building began. Up to this date, building automation systems not only achieve a unique energy efficiency status for the TüV SüD Singapore Headquarter Building, but they also provide profound insights into the overall performance of the building.

TüV SüD: Global Solutions and Local Expertise?

To meet minimum standards for safety and sustainability, TüV SüD emphasizes the need to be familiar with local, national, and international building regulations. When it comes to sustainability, additional certification standards like LEED and BREEAM need to be taken into account. These standards include specific criteria for what is considered sustainable. For BREEAM, TüV SüD is the exclusive licensing partner of BRE Global and the only standard setter in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This allows TüV SüD to assume certification duties, for example, on behalf of governmental bodies, without any interference or bias.

However, numerous other standards are also important in determining optimal solutions and control needs, including energy efficiency and indoor air quality standards, as well as material and product standards. The TüV SüD Centre of Competence for Refrigeration and Air Conditioning is Europe's largest independent test laboratory for functional and performance tests, thermodynamic assessments, and the measurement of sound emissions. TüV SüD can perform virtually all measurements in the fields of refrigeration and air conditioning technology and technical acoustics.?

Interested in finding out more about this and many other sustainability topics from TüV SüD? Check out our Green Building and Infrastructure website and feel free to contact us for information and assistance regarding our TIC solutions for real estate sustainability!

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