Sustainability Reporting Practices of Real Estate Companies from Germany, Austria and Switzerland – First Insights from 2020

Abstract

In the last twenty years, sustainability became a strong move­ment leading to regulatory initiatives around the world. In this study, the Eu­ropean regulation is compared with common sustainability reporting prac­tices in the Real Estate Sector in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The goal of the study is to show what type of information related to employees, and other social and governance issues are being provided and by how many firms in the year 2020. The findings show that more than half of the analyz­ed firms report the total number of employees, the share of women and the number of permanent full-time contracts. Furthermore, supervisory board members are listed by 37 out of 53 companies. More than a third of the 53 companies confirmed to have anti-corruption processes implemented and 25 firms state to have UN SDGs included in their reports. However, details on diversity and employee-related information are often, more than 50% of the time, missing (e.g. salary ratio of woman to man, average sick days/year, total number of trainees, executive pay ratio, total accidents, average age, proportion of female executives, % of woman on the board of directors, staff turnover rate, newly hired employees, employee-satisfaction, full-time em­ployees and part-time employees). Moreover, the involvement of firms, cus­tomers, suppliers and employees in following human rights guidelines, ESG and Code of Conduct rules is low. Less than a third of companies stated to follow the human rights guidelines obtained a sustainability certificate or employee well-being certificate and provided ESG-specific employee train­ing. Performing Code of Conduct training for employees, customer surveys, and implementing business partner Code of Conduct/Supplier Code of Con­duct besides mentioning the cases of corruption and incidents of discrimi­nation are reported by less than one-third of firms. These results are impor­tant for individuals, companies and politicians implementing new rules re­lated to sustainability reporting in Europe.