Sustainability

Sustainability isn’t a side business; it’s truly woven in the fabric of our day to day.

View our 2021 Sustainability Report

Voir notre Rapport de Durabilité 2021

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Questions or suggestions on our approach to sustainability?

WHO WE ARE

We are owners and property managers of homes for nearly 13,000 Canadian households and growing. We are a passionate group of individuals, nearly 500 strong, who work as a team, and are encouraged to use our voices to share ideas and solutions to provide high quality customer care and to have a positive impact in our communities.

The management of environmental, social and governance (ESG) topics is truly woven in the fabric of our day to day. For us, sustainability is a way to explain how we work, how we act, how we perform, and how we grow.

Sustainability objectives

How we work

Environment

We are passionate about implementing sustainable projects and our objective is to pursue initiatives to reduce our environmental impacts. These initiatives benefit our residents, provide development opportunities for our teams and help to safeguard our environment through lower energy consumption, better water and waste management, and reduced GHG emissions.

Social

Our objective is to offer an unsurpassed resident experience in a culture where we value our differences and where everyone feels included and heard, creating a strong sense of belonging. Our goal is to offer a learning environment that supports our team members in their personal development. We believe that dealing with people is the heart of any business, and this is especially true in the multi-family sector since our business impacts someone’s home.

Governance

To maintain the confidence of investors and properly oversee the activities of management, adopting and upholding high standards of governance practices are essential. Our governance system is built on corporate ethics, transparency, compliance, and discipline with the objective of providing timely, accurate, and complete disclosure of all material information to the public.

Read Our Sustainability Policy

We strive to consider five broad stakeholder groups in all business decisions and policies – our residents, our team, our communities, our vendors and our investors.

At InterRent, our robust governance structure and policies are available on our website.

Learn More

Our sustainability policy provides the guiding hand in how we think about ESG considerations in our business, but the governance piece explains how we turn those considerations into action across the entire company.

Social performance metrics

How we act

We provide homes. That is a responsibility that we take very seriously, and it anchors our engagement efforts. Collaboration with all of our stakeholders helped us identify the material social metrics for our business, including how to manage them and how to measure our performance.

Resident satisfaction

Nearly 13,000 households in Canada call an InterRent community their home and so our residents' satisfaction is paramount to our success.

How we performed in 2021

4.2/5

Average google rating

Satisfaction with landlord

70%

Maintenance satisfaction

87%

Move-in satisfaction

91%

Employee engagement

Our team is the lifeblood of the company. We believe that an engaged team is energized, positive, and focused on delivering on our business strategy.

How we performed in 2021 *

80%

Survey response rate

81%

* We measure employee engagement through a formal employee engagement survey conducted by an independent third party every two years. Our inaugural survey took place in November 2020 and our next one is planned for Q4 2022.

Investor engagement

We believe it’s crucial to keep an ongoing and transparent dialogue with the investment community so that we have the financial flexibility to execute on our business strategy.

How we performed in 2021

124

Investor meetings in 2021

60

2021 GRESB score
25% Annual Increase

Community partnership

We believe our role extends beyond the walls of our properties to the communities in which we operate. It is critical that the community organizations and agencies in our regions can count on us as a partner, both financially and with our time.

How we performed in 2021

+$1 Million

Raised

Employees participated in 306 hours of company-sponsored volunteering.

Environmental performance metrics

How we perform

Environmental management and pushing to be better is core to who we are. We have been rolling out green initiatives for more than a decade and you can expect continued improvements in our environment performance in the years ahead.

Energy management

We continually search for ways to reduce energy consumption in our portfolio and increase the share of renewables in our energy mix. For example, almost 100% of our communities have high efficiency boilers and the majority of our suites are equipped with Energy Star® appliances.

Water management

Water is a precious resource that must be managed, and we do so by installing many water-saving measures in our buildings. For example, more than 90% of our suites have low-flow toilets and the majority of our portfolio has water-saving fixtures.

Waste management

In 2021, our waste data coverage improved from 12.4% to 16.4% as a percentage of total area, corresponding to 1,921 tones of non-hazardous waste split 89%/11% between landfill and recycling. It is a challenge to collect waste and recycling data in multi-family communities; however, this topic continues to be a focus for us.

Emissions

As a REIT with 100% Canadian exposure, we believe it is imperative to track our emissions and take action to drive GHG reduction in support of Canada’s climate goals.

Management of resident sustainability impacts

Our environmental management approach extends to resident sustainability impacts. Electrical submetering remains one of our largest conservation measures.

-5%

LFL Energy Consumption IN 2021

-9%

LFL GHG Emissions IN 2021

83%

of our portfolio has submetering capabilities

Exploring building certifications

In 2021, we acquired a 104-suite LEED Gold certified community in Vancouver, representing 0.8% of our year-end suite count, and we conducted an initial evaluation of green building certification opportunities across our portfolio. We have explored LEED, BOMA BEST, Certified Rental Building (CRB), ENERGY STAR, WELL and Fitwel certifications with varying degrees of suitability for existing multi-family communities. We recognize that green building certification is an important signal to stakeholders and have decided to take a deeper dive into BOMA BEST and CRB for applicability to our portfolio, alongside an evaluation of ENERGY STAR on a case-by-case basis. We look forward to sharing the results of our analysis by the end of 2022.

Pilot Projects

How we grow

We love learning. For us, innovation is about a collective desire to constantly strive to find new ways to improve the way we serve our residents and engage with our various stakeholders.

OUR SUSTAINABILITY COMMITMENTS

We’ve identified two focus areas where we plan to go deep over the next few years – climate change, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)

Climate Change

We recognize that climate change is an immense threat that crosses all stakeholder groups with far-reaching implications. We are using the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) as a framework to guide our climate journey.

Where we are today

The TCFD recommendations are structured around four thematic areas.

Governance

Our Board of Trustees has oversight of climate-related risks and opportunities through the Nominations and Governance Committee. Our Senior Management is actively involved in assessing and managing climate-related risks and opportunities through membership on our ESG Committee, stakeholder engagement efforts, and in resource allocation decisions. In 2021, Senior Management created a new role, Director of Sustainability, to lead the development of our climate-readiness roadmap and subsequently approved the six climate commitments that are driving our foundational climate work.

Strategy

We have publicly committed to ‘conduct a baseline climate change risk assessment to identify our company and portfolio physical and transition risks and opportunities’ with the goal of understanding the potential impact of such risks and opportunities on our organization and how we create value for our stakeholders.

Risk Management

We are exploring processes for identifying, assessing, and managing climate-related risks, which will ultimately be integrated into our overall risk management approach. A crucial step toward this exploration is our public commitment to ‘voluntarily disclose climate-related initiatives and performance through the CDP’s climate questionnaire’, which is planned for later this year.

Metrics and Targets

We monitor and publicly disclose our Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions while also investigating the feasibility of assessing, disclosing, and influencing our Scope 3 GHG emissions.

We have publicly committed to ‘establish science-based GHG emissions reduction target(s)’ and are on track to submit our targets for approval by the Science-Based Target Initiative (SBTi) by the end of 2022.

What you can expect from us

CLIMATE COMMITMENT	ANTICIPATED COMPLETION
#1 Conduct a baseline climate change risk assessment to identify our company and portfolio physical and transition risks and opportunities.	Q3 2022
#2 Establish science-based GHG emissions reduction target(s).	Q4 2022 (*)
#3 Voluntarily disclose climate-related initiatives and performance through the CDP’s climate questionnaire.	Q4 2022
#4 Increase our Board of Trustee’s knowledge on climate-related risks and opportunities through training.	Q4 2023
#5 Conduct climate scenario analysis to understand potential impacts on our business strategy.	Q4 2023
#6 Develop a systematic approach to incorporate climate change considerations into our acquisition due diligence process, capex program, and capital recycling decisions.	Q4 2023

* We anticipate establishing science-based GHG emissions reduction target(s) by Q4 2022; however, receiving official SBTi approval for those targets may occur in early 2023.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)

We recognize diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as a core value of our organization. We aim to lay a strong foundation that accurately represents the communities in which we operate while removing systemic biases that can block access, safety, and fulfillment. We believe that the pursuit of DEI is an evolving journey, anchored in cultural safety, where we all understand, accept, and value our differences and where everyone feels included and heard, with a sense of belonging. We believe that storytelling is an engaging way to build awareness, and sharing personal stories features prominently in our DEI activities.

Where we are today

We are advancing on five corporate DEI objectives:

Every individual we interact with is respected, valued and supported.
Team members can bring their whole self to work.
Team member differences are respected and supported.
Create an environment and support a culture where barriers are removed, and all team members have the opportunity to achieve their full potential based on merit.
Our company is to be as diverse as the communities we are serving.

Employee responses to the voluntary self-identification questions in our engagement survey helped us understand the diverse representation of our team.

We pledged to do our part to end anti-black systemic racism in Canada through the BlackNorth Initiative.

We are an Employer Partner with the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI).

We have started having uncomfortable conversations and powerful team moments that are critical to growth.

% Female in Leadership Roles

JANUARY 2021	JANUARY 2022
33%	46%

What you can expect from us

In our inaugural sustainability report, we committed to progressing in four key areas by the end of 2023 to advance on our corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) objectives. 2021 was a critical year in moving forward on these commitments and evolving our culture where we value our differences and where everyone feels included and heard, creating a strong sense of belonging.

Enhance the diversity of our workforce
Equip our team with the knowledge, skills, and comfort to ensure that our DEI work is self-sustaining into the future
Explore racial and gender pay equity analyses
Ensure policies and practices are inclusive