Legal & General Property (LGP) has produced an Office Occupiers' Guide to sustainable property through which it aims to arm its office tenants with the necessary understanding of the environmental impact of property, and a toolkit to implement change.

Legal & General Property (LGP) has produced an Office Occupiers' Guide to sustainable property through which it aims to arm its office tenants with the necessary understanding of the environmental impact of property, and a toolkit to implement change.

LGP said the guide represents just one of many substantial commitments to the green agenda that the company has made over the past 12 months. As one of the largest UK institutional property fund managers with over £8.7 bn (EUR 9.3 bn) of property assets under management, LGP claims it is serious about its role in minimising the impact of the built environment and setting an example of best practice for other property owners and managers.

The company has already broken new ground by being the first investment management firm to provide a six-month training course on sustainable property investment, compulsory for all property fund managers and rolled out to partners and agents. Through the Office Occupiers' Guide, it plans to take this sustainability awareness a step further by putting into action a sustainability strategy for each building within its portfolio.

The guide aims to forge a link between landlords and tenants in tackling change. It is broken down into seven categories of sustainable action, namely waste management, energy, buying goods and services, paper, water, travel, and corporate and social responsibility. Culminating in a list of next steps, the guide recommends establishing a Building Management Committee, through which LGP’s representative managing agents can work together with its tenants to create bespoke sustainability action plans for each building and then put these cost saving, energy efficiencies into motion.

Bill Hughes, Managing Director of Legal & General Property, commented: 'We understand that the sustainable performance of our buildings will play a significant role in shaping our future property investment portfolio and that there is now a real need to work together as an industry to bring about this change. We are working collaboratively with tenants and partners to address the very serious issues of climate change, and we now intend to roll this out across our entire portfolio and produce the substantial results that we know are within reach of our sector.'