Tenants, employees and capital may be demanding more climate accountability from buildings just as the U.S. government pulls back from some of the very tools owners have relied on to measure it, leaving private platforms to fill the gap, rather than regulators.
Even as the current makeup of the Securities Exchange Commission began walking back climate disclosure reporting in early 2025, the shift may be arriving too late to change how money moves. The focus on sustainability has already seeped deeply into underwriting and investment decisions, according to Maureen Waters, the newly appointed chief executive officer of Measurabl, who says “it’s very hard to shift that out,” tells GlobeSt.com. She notes that landlords are already struggling to attract tenants and employees to older buildings that cannot meet evolving demands around environmental performance.
Measurabl helps building owners track sustainability data and meet energy benchmark goals, a function that once might have been viewed as a nice-to-have but has moved firmly into the category of must-have in the eyes of investors, sources and studies have confirmed to GlobeSt.com. That pressure has not eased even as U.S. federal regulators and officials have reversed earlier positions, including backpedaling on the existence of Energy Star, a core federal program for building performance data. The Energy Star database has been critical for energy reporting and carbon management regulations, and “those laws specifically point to Energy Star to comply with the rules,” former Measurabl CEO and now Executive Chairman Matt Ellis told GlobeSt.com in May 2025.
Ellis said the system has effectively become a regular compliance and output engine, powered by front-end data aggregation, benchmarking and what he calls a “mission-critical data set” for owners and investors that need to keep up with policy and capital requirements. International investors also face reporting mandates in other countries and want clarity on how much money is being wasted through environmental inefficiencies, including inefficient power consumption. That scrutiny now reaches from “smaller SMB businesses that are doing compliance” all the way up to “the largest real estate investors reporting on multiple funds,” Waters adds, noting that where a company sits in its sustainability journey, as well as its size and market objectives, can dramatically change its requirements.
With the U.S. government reducing its efforts and available resources, Waters says private companies like Measurabl are stepping in to preserve and organize critical environmental information. “We’re starting to build the ecosystem and connections, so the data becomes more useful,” she tells GlobeSt.com, pointing to a web of inputs that can include customers uploading their own information, utilities, and application programming interfaces feeding data from many markets around the world. The work still runs into two major obstacles: digitization and data quality.
On the digitization front, many customers are still running their sustainability programs off Excel spreadsheets and entire teams devoted to manual data handling, Waters says. The second barrier is the collection process itself and how reliable that information is once it arrives, a “pain point that everyone feels,” she adds. Measurabl has “really doubled down on AI.” However, Waters cautions that even with machine learning and artificial intelligence, portions of the workflow still require double- or triple-checking because certain meter data does not come in properly.
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