The title of the Financial Times article Property market faces green transition challenge already shows how much the perspective on real estate is shifting. It is no longer only about location, rent and yield. It is about how quickly an asset finds its way into a climate compatible future.
For us at DABBEL this development is not a surprise. In conversations with owners, asset managers and operators we see a new principle taking shape. The market is beginning to distinguish systematically between buildings that are ready for a climate neutral future and those that are slowly turning into stranded assets. Anyone who invests today no longer asks only about current energy consumption but about the ability of a building to transform over time.
Why existing buildings are at the centre
Globally the building sector is responsible for more than one third of energy use and energy related emissions. At the same time an uncomfortable truth is on the table. The vast majority of the buildings that will still be in use in the year twenty fifty already exist today. Estimates suggest that around eighty per cent of the twenty fifty stock has already been built.
For owners this changes the key question. It is less about how sustainable the next new development will be. It is about how the existing stock can be made fit for the future in economic and regulatory terms. International scenarios show that around one in five buildings worldwide would need to be prepared for almost climate neutral operation by twenty thirty and that most of the global stock would have to be substantially refurbished by the middle of the century in order for net zero goals to remain achievable.
This turns sustainability into a hard asset topic. Those who do not act now risk rising operating costs, stricter regulation, more expensive financing and declining valuations.
The operational gap between strategy and technology
At a strategic level most market participants agree. Portfolios are supposed to become climate neutral, exposure to regulatory risk and energy prices should fall and the attractiveness for tenants and investors should increase.
The real hurdle lies in the engine room of the buildings. It is there, where heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems run around the clock, that a large share of emissions is generated, while the systems themselves are often the product of history, manually configured and only selectively optimised.
Many portfolio strategies do not fail because of a lack of ambition but because of missing transparency and limited resources in technical operations. Facility management teams juggle alarms, maintenance and user requests. Hardly any time remains for continuous optimisation. This is where the gap opens between a sustainability strategy on paper and actual performance in the building.
How we at DABBEL close this gap
Our perspective at DABBEL is shaped by a simple observation. Long before the market thinks about multi billion renovation programmes, the existing systems are often not operated anywhere near as efficiently as technically possible. Heating, ventilation and cooling systems are among the largest energy consumers in commercial buildings and this is exactly where we focus our work.
DABBEL is a software solution that connects to the existing building management system and optimises the operation of the equipment with artificial intelligence. Instead of relying on rigid schedules and safety margins, our system learns the real behaviour of the building and controls it in a predictive way. Weather, usage patterns, thermal inertia and comfort limits are constantly taken into account in the control decisions.
In practice this leads to significantly lower energy consumption while maintaining or even improving comfort. Based on real projects we see that annual energy consumption can be reduced on average by around twenty per cent, with individual buildings achieving substantially higher savings. These effects are realised without invasive construction work and without additional hardware because the optimisation runs directly on the existing system.
For owners and operators this is much more than a technical gadget. Savings of this magnitude improve operating income, cut emissions and act as a lever on the value of the asset because regulatory and financial risks are reduced.
What this means in concrete terms for investors and owners
From the DABBEL perspective a new approach to the green transformation of real estate is emerging. First of all the market needs transparency on current energy use and on the technical potential in each building. With a structured pre check it is possible to determine for every asset what savings can be achieved through intelligent operations and how these savings fit into the decarbonisation pathway of the portfolio.
The next step is to enable the existing technical systems digitally. Instead of moving straight into expensive refurbishment, AI driven optimisation can cut consumption significantly and at the same time generate the data needed for later investment decisions. This makes it possible to see where deep renovation is truly unavoidable and where intelligent operation already closes a large part of the gap to climate targets and CSRD requirements.
At portfolio level this creates a staged pathway. First optimise operations, then invest in targeted upgrades and link both clearly to climate goals, taxonomy criteria and the overall ESG strategy. Banks and investors can see that there is a credible plan for turning todays energy intensive buildings into future proof assets.
From risk to opportunity for portfolio and planet
The green transformation of the property market is one of the major challenges of the coming decades and at the same time a huge opportunity. Buildings that are demonstrably operated efficiently benefit from lower running costs, more stable cash flows and better access to sustainable capital.
From the DABBEL point of view the conclusion is clear. Anyone serious about the transformation path needs to focus on the existing stock and make the engine room of their buildings intelligent. Artificial intelligence in technical operations does not replace classical refurbishment. It makes refurbishment more predictable, more financeable and more measurable.
The Financial Times headline describes the situation as a challenge. Our experience shows that wherever owners and operators embrace data driven AI powered optimisation, that challenge turns into a very tangible value creation programme. For the portfolio, for the people who use the buildings and for the climate.