The Gap Between Net Zero Strategy and What Happens in the Building
The Future We Build, A Brave Ideas network affiliated show featuring Alex Edds
In this episode of The Future We Build, host Alex Edds sits down with Carl Brooks, CBRE’s Global Head of Sustainability - Property Management, to discuss Carl’s ground-level view on what it actually takes to deliver on the sustainability ambitions.
The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 8
Carl Brooks leads sustainability for CBRE's property management business — a role he built from scratch when he joined as the first embedded sustainability hire in the PM division.
With a career spanning 25 years from waste management consultancy to developer-operator roles at Hammerson and MAPP, Carl now oversees sustainability across one of the largest property management platforms on the planet:
19,000 buildings
2 billion square feet
Across 41 countries
This episode is a ground-level look at what it actually takes to deliver on the sustainability ambitions that investors and landlords are writing into contracts.
The central tension Alex and Carl dig into is one that anyone who's sat on either side of a property management agreement will recognise:
investors want more — more data, more insight, more active performance management — but the property management model is structurally low-margin, fragmented, and historically designed for risk reporting rather than value creation.
Something has to give.
The question is whether the model gets rebuilt around genuine performance, or whether the pressure just keeps compressing margins until the system breaks.
Key Timestamps
[00:00:00] : how does property management actually deliver on sustainability commitments made at investment level?
[00:03:50] Carl's career origin:, working with Diageo and Nike out of a seven-person office on the South Bank.
[00:05:00] Moving into real estate 18 years ago — starting at Hammerson
[00:06:00] Why Carl joined CBRE: the opportunity to build the first embedded, decentralised sustainability function in the PM business from scratch — at global scale.
[00:07:00] The "big green machine" problem: how siloed business lines inside firms like CBRE and JLL mean clients see one brand but get fragmented services
[00:10:00] The spectrum of client maturity globally: three broad contractual buckets
[00:12:30] CBRE's PM scale: 19,000 buildings, 3.2 billion square feet, 41 countries.
[00:18:00] The origin of the BBP Managing Agents Partnership:
[00:20:45] What the specialist sustainability team actually looks like
[00:21:30] Why CBRE standardised on a single data platform.
[00:24:00] The "hourglass" model: a specialist sustainability team sitting at the centre.
[00:26:00] AI-assisted triage at portfolio scale: virtual retrofit modelling, climate risk adaptation, benchmark analysis
[00:29:00] The real people problem in PM: on-ground building teams care deeply about their buildings
[00:30:00] "We want 20% more for 10% less" — the recontracting dynamic that is slowly destroying the value of property management
[00:33:00] COVID as a watershed moment: property owners suddenly understood who was keeping the lights on and the doors open.
[00:34:00] Centralised delivery vs. engaged delivery: why implementing solutions without involving building teams almost always reopens the performance gap
[00:39:00] Carl's closing answer: he wants sustainability to be the actual objective — not just a filter applied to investment decisions.
[00:42:00] The data blind spot: social impact, occupier engagement, and placemaking generate huge amounts of value that never gets captured, structured, or reported
Organisations Mentioned
CBRE
JLL
LaSalle Investment Management
MAPP (previously referenced as MAP)
Hammerson
Better Buildings Partnership (BBP)
UK Green Building Council (UKGBC)
DeepKi
Measurabl
Diageo
Nike
Amazon
Google
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