Green business has long been touted as good business. There’s only one problem: Metrics to support that hypothesis traditionally have been in short supply. Now comes Dr Nils Kok, real estate finance professor at Maastricht University, a visiting economist at the University of California at Berkeley, and co-founder and executive director of the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB), an organisation dedicated to mitigating the enormous environmental impact made by real estate structures as well as tracking the positive financial impact recorded by those who are implementing sustainability measures.

Real estate developers the world over are known to be overly optimistic at the top of cycles but downright pessimistic at the bottom, when the economy starts showing signs of new growth.