Could ’embodied carbon under management’ replace ‘AUM’?

Cromwell Property Group managing director Europe Pertti Vanhanen says that he foresees a time when investors do not just quote their assets that they have under management but instead that they discuss embodied carbon under management.

“It’s not only operational carbon it’s also embodied carbon and those other decisions that you make before you start a development project,” he said.

“ESG is here to stay,” Vanhanen added. “We are really pushing that forward ourselves as well.”

“We have invested in it ourselves quite a lot and for that we have hired more ESG people into our organisation,” Vanhanen said when Real Asset Media caught up with him at the recent MIPIM real estate show.

Apart from ESG, another key takeaway from the show was people’s concern about the longevity of the banking crisis, and thus when investors will return to the market so that buyers and sellers begin to meet on price again.

“That is really the key question for the future because it’s been a pretty quiet first quarter of the year,” Vanhanen said.

He said that Cromwell launched a new fund in Germany but the war in Ukraine has delayed investors’ decisions, “so we are really trying to push those forward during this year”.

Meanwhile, Cromwell has won new mandates and has roughly a €1.8 billion of dry powder to invest across Europe in the Nordics and Germany. Its Singapore-listed Cromwell European REIT also has developments on the stocks and is selling older assets to recycle equity, “so that we can we can complete those interesting developments in Italy, Czech and Slovakia and so forth.”

Please click on the video above to watch the full interview or listen to the podcast below.