Cherre Joins Industry Group Collaboration on Environmental Data Standards

Cherre announced that it will join the environmental data collaboration led by OSCRE International, a real estate industry non-profit that focuses on real estate data standards and governance.

OSCRE announced the collaboration in September 2022. It has already been working with such companies as Blackstone, BentallGreenOak, Brookfield, CBRE, ConnexFM, CoreNet Global, CW, EY, IFMA, JLL, Hines, Lionpoint, MRI, and Yardi.

ESG tracking, with an emphasis on the environmental aspect, has become increasingly important for commercial real estate, both for regulatory compliance and investor concern. However, given the importance of data for management and reporting, the lack of consistent industry standards, like data definitions and methods for compiling information, has made the work much harder.

Some of the problems that OSCRE has identified include inconsistent multiple data sources, high reliance on data originated and managed by others, and extensive manual effort to prepare data for reporting and analytics, which can result in increased errors.

OSCRE sees as solutions a standard data set, improved integrated data flows, common data for all stakeholders, automated data flows for reporting, better linkage to corporate social responsibility reporting, and improved analytics and decision making.

“Cherre will provide its expertise in data normalization and entity resolution to help develop environmental data standards,” a company press release said. “This will be crucial as ESG data management and governance initiatives gain momentum, necessitating data standardization to ensure consistency with governance, reporting, and measurement regardless of the data source or point solution.”

Data normalization is an IT industry term for cleaning data and having it presented in the same way across systems, so that different software applications can confidently share data. In a sense, it’s like putting data from different places into the same language. Entity resolution is the process of linking together data records across multiple computer systems that represent the same thing.

The company says that it is participating in the Environmental Data Standards Working Group’s development phase. That involves “direct emissions policy, data collection from functional owners and supply chain, data reporting requirements of supply chain, facilities management, benchmarking, and compliance and governance.”

“Stakeholders such as investors, landlords, and tenants rely on each other for reliable, accurate, and readily accessible usage and emissions data, but the current approach to collecting and managing environmental data often falls short,” Cherre wrote. “Although collecting property-level data is critical to guide decisions on a portfolio’s impact, stakeholders utilize different methods for reporting on and leveraging environmental information. Typically, organizations collect disparate ESG data from multiple sources, manually extract relevant information, and transfer it to a spreadsheet for reporting and decision-making. The industry needs to simplify and standardize these processes to meet its ESG mandates and goals.”