Exploring responsible property investing: a survey of American executives

Abstract

Property is an important part of modern economies with signifi cant social and environmental consequences. As a result, practitioners and scholars have begun focusing on the social responsibility and sustainability of property investors. This paper expands that work by examining Responsible Property Investing among investment organizations in the United States. Responsible Property Investing is defi ned as efforts that go beyond compliance with minimum legal requirements to better manage the environmental, social, and governance issues associated with property investing. A survey of senior American executives fi nds that most organizations are going beyond com pliance, implementing management strategies and investing in properties that are consistent with Responsible Property Investment principles. Most executives also place their organization beyond compliance in a Responsible Property Investing stage model. Business concerns are the leading drivers and impediments. Among the various types of organizations studied, pension funds, foundations and endowments lag behind others in implementing Responsible Property Investing. Copyright

The Positioning of Sustainability within Residential Property Marketing

“…This by and large confirms findings by Dair and Williams (2006) and Gyourko and Rybczynski (2000), but differs from those of Pivo (2008a). At times, by being the first to pick up a new feature of sustainability, the non-profit/ public sector has even acted as an innovator.…”

Practicalities bottleneck to pension fund responsible investment?

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“…The findings of Pivo () share several similarities with organisational and institutional impediments. Pivo () suggests that the main impediments to responsible investment in property investing include insufficient financial performance, lack of information, incompatibility with fiduciary duty, legal restrictions and internal resistance within organisations. Haigh () finds that the authorities have provided limited support to the financial industry with respect to how to consider and account for climate change in investment decisions.…”

Managers as drivers of CSR in state-owned enterprises

“…In this respect, the items included were based on a set of CSR-related benefits mentioned in previous research (Welford, Chan, and Man 2007;Pivo 2008;Brønn and VidaverCohen 2009;Jamali 2009;Pedersen and Neergaard 2009;Pedersen 2011) (see Table 2). These items were intended to address research question Q3 and were evaluated on a Likert scale from 1 to 4 (where 1 ¼ Very Unimportant, 2 ¼ Unimportant, 3 ¼ Important, and 4 ¼ Very Important).…”