One building, two sets of priorities.
Owners face growing pressure from regulators and investors to decarbonise their portfolios. Occupiers want spaces that support their climate goals, their people and their brand.
Their interests largely align, but each side holds a different piece of the picture. Questions of who pays and who benefits take time to resolve. ULI Europe wanted to create a space where they could work through them together, and asked us to design and run it.
Curiosity first, solutions second.
A community of practice learns together over time, turning what it learns into action. We started small: nine founding members, and three questions they cared about. Word spread, and the community doubled in size.
Members met online between events to dig into each question. At ULI conferences, we tested their thinking using formats that got people out of their seats. In one session, participants pinned every point where owners and occupiers interact to the timeline of a lease, then looked for where new ones could speed things up. In another, we tested whether there was real appetite to talk about embodied carbon.
In a third, owners and occupiers role-played a fund and three very different tenants negotiating an upgrade to an ageing office. One group invented a "data mediator" to bring hard numbers into the conversation, and keep assumptions out of it.
From shared questions to guidance the sector can use.
In the first year, members chose to focus on property managers. They imagined them becoming a central node between owners and occupiers. The strongest idea to emerge was an asset-level committee that brings owners and occupiers together around a single building. That idea became ULI's Asset Sustainability Committees Best Practice Guide, published in February 2026.
In the second year, members turned to embodied carbon. Members set a goal for 2040, then worked backwards in three-year steps to map what would need to change. Two insights came through clearly. Embodied carbon is as much a communication challenge as a technical one. And split incentives are a question of market design: structural and contractual, rather than technical. Members turned both into proposals for future work: a messaging playbook for embodied carbon, and a closer look at how owners and occupiers share the value of retrofit.
“The session with Andrea Carpenter and Suzy Glass from BRAE was particularly illuminating. We need clearer narratives that translate technical achievements into compelling stories.”
Laura Carrara-Cagni, Founding Director · Cagni Williams
founding members, from both sides of the lease
organisations in the community by 2025
enquiry areas, chosen by members and explored in depth
best practice guide, published by ULI Europe in 2026
Owners and occupiers worked on the same questions, as peers.
Formats moved debate away from assumptions and towards what the numbers show.
The community's thinking on asset-level collaboration reached the wider market through ULI's guide.
Embodied carbon as a communication challenge; split incentives as market design.