Foreword
Dear readers,
As one of Europe’s leading private residential real estate companies with a portfolio comprising almost 550,000 apartments in around 65,000 buildings and a fair value of almost € 84 billion, we are aware of our particular responsibility towards our shareholders, tenants and society at large.
Vonovia provides homes and quality of life in almost all of Germany’s attractive cities and regions as well as in Austria and Sweden. We take this responsibility seriously and actively seek to find answers to pressing social issues on the housing front. We are committed to greater climate protection, create more senior-friendly apartments and foster community spirit in our neighborhoods. We also make a key contribution to building new apartments and our core business helps to support processes of social and ecological change.
Sustainability is thus a key component of our corporate strategy.
In order to provide transparent and comprehensive information on the progress we have made, and our performance, in the field of sustainability, we started publishing a separate annual Sustainability Report nine years ago.
Sustainability reporting has been subject to ongoing changes ever since. We are currently faced with more, and very far-reaching, changes as a result of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The Directive means that the Annual Report is increasingly becoming the focal point of reporting, and will also provide considerably more quantitative information going forward.
Back in 2023, we revamped our website and, alongside our customer website (www.vonovia.de), also created a Group website (www.vonovia.com). The latter provides us with a whole host of opportunities for presenting information that we used to report in the Sustainability Report on the website in a corporate context.
This prompted us to take the next step with our sustainability reporting and, instead of publishing a separate Sustainability Report, to present our sustainability strategy and all relevant sustainability topics on our Group website.
We also started enhancing our climate reporting by publishing our answers in the context of the Carbon Disclosure Project Assessment (CDP Climate Change). Our EPRA and PAI reports, which you will also find under the Investor Relations section of our website, create additional transparency.
A key component of our new reporting approach remains extensive figures that are audited by an independent third-party body. This ESG Factbook sees us continue with our tradition of detailed and audited ESG reporting.
The ESG Factbook supplements the Annual Report and the information provided on our website. All of the tables in the ESG Factbook are available to be downloaded as Excel files to make them more practical to use and analyze. We have kept the structure of the table formats more or less the same to ensure continuity and comparability, so a lot of the tables will be familiar to you if you have used our sustainability reports in the past.
We hope that this information goes some way to providing you with the knowledge you have been looking for. If you have any further questions, my team and I will be happy to help.
Catrin Coners
Head of Sustainability/Strategy at Vonovia SE