SIERA Proprietary Benchmarks

SIERA Proprietary Benchmark Help Guide

11 March 2025

Quick Access

• What are SIERA’s proprietary benchmarks?
• Why do they matter?
• How do they work?
• How did the SIERA team develop these benchmarks?
• What step-by-step approach determined the benchmarks?
• Did the SIERA team exclude or normalise any data?
• How did the SIERA team verify these benchmarks?
• What are SIERA’s proprietary benchmark outputs?

What are SIERA’s proprietary benchmarks?

Benchmarks are standards or reference points that help you compare and assess how well you’re doing in terms of sustainability. At EVORA Global, we understand that you want to measure the sustainability of your assets, and this often demands industry benchmarks.

Our sustainability consultants noticed that there weren’t enough complete and up-to-date benchmarks available. So, we created our own unique proprietary benchmarks to solve this problem. These proprietary benchmarks are built into SIERA to provide valuable data insights. With this information, you can make informed decisions and advance your sustainability goals.

We provide benchmarks for electricity, heat, and water across all countries and sectors within CRREM. These mean intensity values are derived from the relative data source, focus on operational emissions, and do not include embodied carbon.

Why do they matter?

SIERA’s benchmarks empower you with the necessary tools to make informed, collaborative decisions that not only enhance asset performance and reduce costs but also improve your bottom line.

By leveraging these benchmarks, you can drive meaningful sustainability improvements, align with industry standards, work towards net zero objectives, and ultimately create a positive impact. With a deep understanding of your assets’ sustainability performance through our benchmarks, you can strategically navigate the challenges of today’s complex business landscape while maximising the potential for long-term success.

How do they work?

When utility consumption data for assets is missing, SIERA uses these benchmarks to fill in the gaps (translucent bars). By integrating these benchmarks into SIERA, we provide reasonable estimates of asset and fund level performance. This supports comprehensive tracking and analysis of your carbon emissions, energy, and water consumption, even when complete data is not available.

Fund Level Gap-Filling

Asset Level Gap-Filling

How did the SIERA team develop these benchmarks?

The source data for the EVORA Benchmarks are 2024 GRESB Submissions undertaken by EVORA. These were supplied via the following processing:

• Only data points from assets that qualify as standing investments (i.e., are owned and operational) are included in the data.
• Only data points from the 2024 GRESB assessment year are included. This includes data points reported in the current data year (i.e. 2023 consumption)
• The minimum allowed number of assets in each group / benchmark category is 10
• Intensities have been normalised for 100% floor-based, time-based and occupancy-based consumption.
• Only assets with whole building consumption or full landlord/tenant reported consumption have been used.
• Only assets which are at least 50% occupied have been used.

Energy Intensity (kWh/m²) data has been provided for each sector / country which meets the above requirement of at least 10 assets. This has been split by fuel type (i.e. electricity and heating fuels) within the raw data inputs.

The energy intensity values are provided as an median, as well as 15^th, 25^th, 50^th, 75^th ,85^th percentiles.

Other sources of data were also used in in preparing the benchmarks including:

Country Specific Data sources e.g.

• CBECS 2018 in the US
• SCIEU 2019 and SHEU 2019 in Canada
• L’édition 2022 du Baromètre de la Performance Energétique in France
• 2022 Commercial Building Baseline Study in Australia
• Industry standard benchmarks such as CIBSE Guide F and TM46

What step-by-step approach determined the benchmarks?

EVORA undertook circa 163 GRESB assessments in 2024 covering over 10,000+ assets.

In preparing the benchmarks, EVORA has focussed on the largest funds, whilst also accounting for coverage across various geographic regions. The benchmarks were based on considering over 122 funds and almost 9,900 assets. Of these, GRESB energy data was available on a whole building or full landlord/tenant basis for 6,730 assets in total.

Data was collected from the GRESB spreadsheets which were downloaded from the GRESB portal. This is considered the most accurate data source as we are aware that not all submissions go via SIERA and funds which are submitted via SIERA are often amended within the GRESB portal.

The process of creating the benchmarks was as follows:

• Data from GRESB submissions was collected and processed. Only assets with full data coverage were considered.
• Where the CRREM sector type included 10 or more assets, a benchmark was created.
• Where the GRESB subsector types included 10 or more assets, a benchmark was created.
• Where no benchmark could be created, country-specific benchmarks were used to fill in gaps.
• Where no country-specific data source was available, a benchmark was created using assets in a similar climatic region e.g. sub-tropic Europe.
• Lastly default benchmarks were used from CIBSE where no other suitable data sources were available.

Did the SIERA team exclude or normalise any data?

• We excluded data associated with flagged intensity outliers
• We excluded outdoor consumption and intensity data from indoor metrics
• We normalised coverage data for intensities by area, time, and occupancy-based consumption
• We itemised metrics based on whole building performance, unless otherwise stated
• We based intensity data on the gross internal area (GIA) to calculate whole building performance

How did the SIERA team verify these benchmarks?

• We compared our results against industry-standard benchmarks
• We used our own expertise in data collection and performance assessment
• We used validated data already stored in SIERA

What are SIERA’s proprietary benchmark outputs?

Electricity and Heat Intensity values have been provided for all countries and sectors within CRREM.

• A single intensity value (kWh/m²) is provided for electricity per country and sector. This does not vary if the asset is single or multi-fuel
• A single intensity value (kWh/m²) is provided for heat per country and sector. This does not vary regardless of how the heat is generated (gas, oil, district heat etc)
• One intensity value for water (cubic meters/m²) per country and sector
• One intensity value Primary Energy Intensity (kWh/m²) is provided per country and sector

To calculate carbon (kgCO2/m2), we apply the emissions conversion factor for that asset based on its country and year.

To assist reporting, you can select your preferred emissions factor. If not specified, we provide standard default factors based on your asset’s location.

Get in Touch with the SIERA Team

If you encounter any difficulties while following these instructions or require further clarification, please get in touch with our team who are here to support you and address any questions or concerns you may have.

Thank you for reading our latest help guide,

SIERA Team