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Sustainability isn’t a side business; it’s truly woven in the fabric of our day to day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nearly 13,000 households in Canada call an InterRent community their home and so our residents' satisfaction is paramount to our success.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Our environmental management approach extends to resident sustainability impacts. Electrical submetering remains one of our largest conservation measures.
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.
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)
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.
The TCFD recommendations are structured around four thematic areas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
CLIMATE COMMITMENT | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION |
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#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 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.
We are advancing on five corporate DEI objectives:
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.
JANUARY 2021 | JANUARY 2022 |
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33% | 46% |
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.
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* In 2020, energy consumption reflects data for which InterRent received and paid bills and excluded any resident accounts that were separately metered. In 2021, data coverage improved as we moved closer toward collecting whole-building data.
1 In 2020, emissions reflect data for which InterRent received and paid bills and excluded any resident accounts that were separately metered. In 2021, data coverage improved as we moved closer toward collecting whole-building data.
When faced with having to dig up the pavement in our parking areas at Parkway Park to replace broken underground wiring, we pivoted to install solar lights and were able to keep our paved lots intact, minimize disruption to our residents, and bring a renewable source into our energy mix. Due to this successful test project, we expanded installation to the Forest Ridge properties.
With the help of our partner, MicroHabitat, we turned an unused portion of our roof at Appartements VIE in Montreal into a thriving urban garden, helping to reconnect people to nature. The 300-pound seasonal harvest was donated on a weekly basis to our community partner, Chez Doris, to support their daily meal program.
We added a micro cogeneration unit to our Ottawa community, LIV, which produces heat and electrical power simultaneously through high efficiency heat and power generation. At LIV, this translates to a 17% offset in electrical consumption from the grid and a 20% reduction in domestic hot water production from boilers, leading to $25,000 in annual savings.
We are currently testing this at communities in Montreal, Ottawa, and Burlington to solve the problem of package deliveries piling up in lobbies. Through this system, parcel couriers are provided with timed access to a secure package/lockers room and residents are notified electronically that a package is waiting for pick-up, thus providing a convenient, secure and organized package delivery system for our resident base.
We partnered with Enbridge Gas to install building automation system (BAS) upgrades at our Lakeshore Club community in Burlington. The project generates 38,200m3 in annual natural gas savings, a 40% reduction from pre-project levels, leading to cost savings and enhanced building operational control for our
facilities team, while ensuring continued resident comfort.
We installed this well to tap into ground water for our lawn irrigation and to water plants and flowers around the community rather than pulling from the municipal water supply. The project generates financial savings of about $15,000 each year and we estimate annual water savings of 2,670m3 – the equivalent of one Olympic sized swimming pool.
We partnered with Enbridge Gas to install building automation system (BAS) upgrades at five of our communities in Stoney Creek. The project generates over 41,700 m3 in annual natural gas savings, an 18% reduction from pre-project levels, and has reduced at least 79,000 kg of CO2. This initiative has led to cost savings and enhanced building operational control for our facilities team, while ensuring continued resident comfort.
In 2021, we launched a partnership with car sharing company, Communauto, to offer dedicated parking spaces at five of our Montreal communities. This initiative gives our residents, employees, and neighbourhood Communauto members access to a fleet of hundreds of vehicles at their doorstep, which can be reserved up to a month in advance. Carsharing reduces the number of vehicles on the road, which decreases traffic congestion and CO2 emissions, and means less space required for parking and more opportunity for urban green spaces.
We have been gradually incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into our building systems upgrades. Through practical experimentation on a weekly point-by-point basis, we have tested how different AI aspects respond, and we are now finalizing a template design to see how we can incorporate our learnings across all properties. We expect the full roll-out to be implemented by the beginning of next heating season, 2022/2023, allowing us to have better prediction and an even faster response time to changing weather conditions and fluctuating thermal loads of the building.
We installed this well to tap into ground water for our lawn irrigation and to water plants and flowers around the community rather than pulling from the municipal water supply. The project generates financial savings of about $15,000 each year and we estimate annual water savings of 2,670m3 – the equivalent of one Olympic sized swimming pool.
The four boilers at our community at 100 Main St. East in Hamilton originally used 8 million BTUs to heat the building. After analyzing four years of historical heating data, we replaced them with high efficiency boilers and adjusted controller settings to absolute levels with added sensors and eliminated 2 million BTUs of unnecessary consumption. The project reduced ongoing maintenance requirements and GHG emissions and has resulted in over $8,500 of natural gas savings per year while still keeping residents cozy in -25o weather.
In 2021, we installed 11 EarthBins® across five GTA communities. These waste containers are installed partially below the surface, which reduces pests and odours, increases the amount of waste to be stored and reduces the frequency of overall pickups and related CO2 emissions. This creative solution allows for a more aesthetic and compact design, which leads to optimization on the grounds and frees up space for other uses such as increased resident parking. EarthBin® containers are also recognized by crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), which safeguards users and prevents illegal activity and dumping.
* In 2020, energy consumption reflects data for which InterRent received and paid bills and excluded any resident accounts that were separately metered. In 2021, data coverage improved as we moved closer toward collecting whole-building data.
1 In 2020, emissions reflect data for which InterRent received and paid bills and excluded any resident accounts that were separately metered. In 2021, data coverage improved as we moved closer toward collecting whole-building data.