Everything you need to know about IBOS

When the RICS launched its International Building Operation Standard last month, interest across the real estate sector was piqued. As a framework designed to collect data on buildings to meet sustainability and wellness targets as well as drive efficiency and energy performance, this new standard could answer a myriad questions around how existing and upcoming assets can be future-proofed. And all from the ultimate perspective of the end user. Paul Bagust, RICS head of property standards and the driving force behind the long-awaited framework, reveals how IBOS could be the key to better, more flexible and more valuable buildings. EG: IBOS should help to answer a question that many businesses are currently asking. How do you define a good building? Is it cost efficiency? Is it ESG targets? Is it function? Is it wellbeing? Your framework suggests it can (and should) be all of the above. Why is this overarching approach so important? PB: Because everything is so connected. There’s a danger sometimes that we focus too much on one particular thing when we are talking about the value of a building. Taking a broader view is how you can see and understand how everything is connected. IBOS looks at user experience in a number of ways with a focus on compliance, function, costs, sustainability and performance. EG: How do each of those five pillars translate into measurable data points to work out the value of a building? PB: We look at each of them through the lens of user experience because that’s where value really stems from. So, compliance means collecting data on things like temperature and noise which have a huge impact on what it is like to use a building. Function would be a focus on how much space you have, how dense your building is, which days are busy, and which are less so. Cost – a critical thing for real estate – is a focus on capital and operational expenditure. Then you get into the sustainability challenge, looking at operational energy use, waste transport and social impact. The final piece of the puzzle is the impact this will all have on experience, wellbeing and how well those within the building are performing. What is their productivity level? How happy are they in the building? It is these connections we are so interested in with IBOS. There’s a relationship between everything. The temperature in a building impacts on the experience for the user and can, in turn, have a cost implication which may also impact your sustainability strategy. We hope that this standard will help gather the right information to develop better buildings. EG: This isn’t just for offices is it? PB: No. It’s for all buildings. We are talking about everything from children in schools to people in hospitals. Any interaction we have with a building must have user experience at its heart. EG: IBOS is a great step forward, but it is a high-level framework. What about plans to introduce a practical element that will make it easier for organisations to measure and benchmark building performance? PB: Yes, there will be a self-assessment tool which will be coming on stream in the coming months. Essentially it will ask a series of questions around an organisation’s building in relation to the five pillars and will generate a report which will show you what is going well and areas where you might want to improve. It is important to me that this is about helping to identify areas where you might want to improve rather than making you feel like you aren’t doing well. There is so much that can be done to improve our buildings once we have identified where there might be room for that. We want to offer support, showcase good practice and we are very keen to collaborate. We are working with WELL and Wiredscore because they have tremendous certification schemes but also, they can see the value of a broad standard. EG: This framework has been a long time coming. Can you tell me a bit about the timing? PB: There is a real opportunity now while everybody is looking at the role buildings play in our world. The real estate industry has an opportunity and an obligation to demonstrate its value around this exploration. We need to be able to demonstrate and measure building performance in a way that is communicable. That comes down to data. It’s a cliché, but we are on a bit of a journey as a profession and an industry with this. It’s OK to accept that we’re learning quite a lot as we go along. The key question is: what data should we collect? That’s where those five pillars come in again. EG: For many years the importance of wellness and wellbeing within a building was dismissed by many within real estate as not being core to the value of a building. This is increasingly no longer the case but there are still cynics out there. Do you think that connecting wellness and happiness to core business measurables like cost and function will help to show just how important user experience really is? PB: Exactly that, yes. It all comes back to what people want and that has never been more important when it comes to the value of a building. This isn’t some sort of airy-fairy concept. How productive people are, how happy they are in a building is critical to performance. At the moment in particular, the benefits of wellbeing fuelling people’s return to work and wanting to stay in those buildings should not be underestimated. We need to be able to measure that and show value. I think traditionally this is something we haven’t really measured in favour of focusing solely on the cost side of things. But that’s not the same as the value side of things. EG: Speaking of value, if everything covered by IBOS is so crucial to building performance, does that mean the next step would be for those data points to contribute to valuations? PB: That’s a really good question. It has come up a lot. There is a lack of data at the moment and a lot of it is retrospective, which has been a challenge for valuers. So, the more data we can collect and the more impactful the standard becomes, would that start to have an impact on the valuation process as we look down the line? It would certainly be very interesting and something for us to talk about. Wellbeing getting factored into valuations seems to be something the market would prioritise as an important factor the way it now prioritises ESG. So, it may well happen in the future. The more data we can collect, the more chance there is that will happen. To send feedback, e-mail emily.wright@eg.co.uk or tweet @EmilyW_9 or @EGPropertyNews