Real Estate Sustainability Teams Are Leaner Than Ever. The Work Isn’t.

75% of sustainability leaders say their teams are severely understaffed (1). At the same time, reporting and compliance burdens keep piling up.

That tension defines the state of sustainability in commercial real estate today.

Over the last few years, sustainability mandates have expanded dramatically. City and state regulations are accelerating, often moving from benchmarking to full performance standards.

These requirements vary widely by jurisdiction, creating a regulatory patchwork that is effectively a full-time job to manage.

At the same time, investor expectations around carbon transparency and energy performance also continue to rise.

But the teams responsible for delivering all of this haven’t grown to match the scope of the work. In fact, they’re shrinking in absolute terms. 

The result is a critical productivity problem that limits progress toward stated goals. It’s 2026, and many teams expected to be delivering meaningful impact by now.

When Sustainability Becomes a Cleanup Function

Internal teams are expected to drive progress, set priorities, and deliver against long-term sustainability goals.

In reality, they’re bogged down by reporting and compliance, which still require an enormous amount of time. Utility bill chasing, spreadsheet cleaning, and fixing data inconsistencies consume disproportionate bandwidth.

When these teams inevitably hit capacity limits, consultants are brought in to help with simple and repetitive tasks like data collection and entry. Over time, they end up owning the processes and the data. They become gatekeepers instead of force multipliers.

The irony is that the work sustainability teams actually want to do: improving building performance, reducing emissions, engaging tenants, and identifying high ROI opportunities, is exactly the work they don’t have time for.

As a result, sustainability efforts may focus on one or two important retrofits or upgrade projects, while many other high-impact opportunities are never evaluated or pursued.

Reporting Shouldn’t Be The Finish Line

Benchmarking and reporting are definitely important. They unlock access to capital and reduce regulatory risk.

But they should be treated as a prerequisite.

With GRESB and other frameworks evolving, and performance standards increasingly pushing toward efficiency and decarbonization, benchmarking has become the initial point to understand how, when, and where capital should be deployed most effectively.

Making investment decisions without a clear understanding of the data and how your portfolio is actually performing is reckless.

But what often happens is that many organizations get stuck at this point.

To progress, it is necessary to recognize decarbonization is not a portfolio-level decision. It is a series of asset-level decisions shaped by regulation, lease structures, remaining hold periods, underwriting assumptions, and cost of capital.

Evaluating those scenarios requires weighing compliance risk against capital availability, timing upgrades against lease rollover, and prioritizing projects that actually fit within the investment strategy.

But it is also time-intensive work. And for lean sustainability teams, the bandwidth required to evaluate these scenarios across an entire portfolio does not exist.

The Limits of Traditional Reporting Tools

Reporting tools have meaningfully evolved over the past decade. They have helped centralize documentation and streamline parts of the data ingestion and benchmarking process.

For many teams, this was an important first step.

But the reality in which lean sustainability teams are bogged down fixing data, chasing missing information, and managing a lot of different tools and consultants just to make the process minimally workable shows that these platforms are still far from effective.

Many tools struggle to ingest data from thousands of sources while maintaining accuracy and consistency, and most still cannot guarantee full coverage. Tenant-controlled utility data often remains a black box.

Even when data coverage and the reporting process are technically satisfactory, another limitation surfaces.

Most platforms offer a high-level understanding of performance, but lack real asset-level context. Generic decarbonization recommendations may look directionally correct, but they rarely translate into decisions that can actually be executed.

As a result, many organizations are left with reports that describe the problem well, but do little to clarify what should happen next.

That connection between portfolio strategy and asset-level action is what ultimately determines whether sustainability efforts move beyond reporting and into execution.

Making Limited Bandwidth Count

Consultants play an important role in sustainability programs, and for many organizations they are not only useful but necessary. In many cases, it makes far more sense to rely on external expertise than to build and maintain a fully staffed internal team with every required skill set.

The issue is not the use of consultants, but how their time is spent.

When highly paid consultants are pulled into basic tasks like data collection, entry, and manual cleanup, they add little/no strategic value.

At that point, they are not accelerating or improving outcomes. They are compensating for gaps in tooling and processes.

At the same time, maintaining reporting solutions that fail to deliver reliable results creates a similar problem. When platforms cannot handle data complexity, teams are forced to either divert internal bandwidth to fix issues or bring in additional consultants to keep the process afloat. In practice, this often means paying twice: once for the software, and again for the labor required to make it usable.

Both scenarios lead to the same outcome. Time and budget are consumed by foundational work, while higher-value activities are deferred.

In an environment where resources are limited, that tradeoff matters. The time sustainability teams do have should be spent evaluating decarbonization scenarios.

This is where consultants add real value, supporting complex analysis and helping teams pressure-test decisions rather than filling in spreadsheets.

Benchmarking cannot consume the majority of a team’s time when it represents only a fraction of what a successful decarbonization journey requires.

When 80% of effort goes into reporting, there is little capacity left for the 20% of work that actually drives change.

So what does it look like to actually rebalance that equation?

It starts by redesigning how benchmarking, data, and decision-making work together.

Do this instead:

Step 1: Remove friction from benchmarking

Benchmarking should be fast, automated, and accurate. If reporting cycles require weeks of cleanup, manual QA, or consultant support just to get to usable data, they are already consuming too much bandwidth.

Step 2: Guarantee complete data coverage

Prioritization breaks down when parts of the portfolio are missing. Without near-complete coverage, teams are forced to make decisions with blind spots. Creating value for tenants and giving them something in return is what unlocks their cooperation and enables full data coverage, without the constant friction of chasing bills.

Step 3: Focus execution on priority assets

Portfolio benchmarks are essential to identify priority assets and determine where focus should be. From there, asset-level insight is required to understand which actions will deliver the highest ROI and value. With clarity on risk, ROI, and timing, teams can concentrate limited capital and effort where it actually moves the needle, instead of spreading resources thin.

Step 4: Use consultants where they create leverage

Consultants should support scenario analysis, capital planning, and decision-making, not own data pipelines or fix reporting gaps. Their value comes from judgment and expertise, not from filling operational holes.

That combination is what allows sustainability teams to move beyond managing processes and toward delivering measurable outcomes, even as expectations continue to rise and resources remain constrained.

This is exactly the operating model Enertiv was built to support. Talk to us.

Takeaway

With limited resources and rising reporting and compliance burdens, every drop of available bandwidth has to be spent on getting projects done.

Reporting and benchmarking are essential, but they should not consume the majority of a team’s capacity. When foundational work dominates the calendar, decarbonization, efficiency, and execution inevitably fall behind.

The path forward is not more tools or more manual effort. It is an operating model that removes friction from reporting, delivers complete and reliable data, and allows teams and consultants to focus on what actually drives impact.

For lean sustainability teams, progress depends on turning limited bandwidth into execution.

1 - https://www.leafr.com/the-true-state-of-sustainability-read-report