By Maja Christenson,

Marketing Manager, Evora Global 

Picture a fund manager on stage at an investor day. Slides are polished, the opening joke lands, then a hand goes up: “Can you show the tenant meters behind that 12 % cut you quoted?”. One awkward pause later, the room senses trouble.

Missing data doesn’t stay hidden for long, and markets charge interest on silence.

The Market is Pushing for Better Data

A few years ago, energy data sat quietly in the appendix, today it headlines earnings calls.

GRESB cares less about big promises than about proof. Under its latest guide, any asset that can’t show energy data for at least 75 % of its floor area is knocked out of the scoring pool. Drop below that line and your intensity metrics thin out, dragging the final score.

SFDR pushes the bar even higher. The Level 2 rules force Article 8 and 9 funds to publish the product’s energy-consumption-intensity. And supervisors now ask managers to spell out data sources and state how much of the data behind their calculations is estimated; EPC-only proxies means you spend the next meeting explaining assumptions instead of talking about performance.

Green-bond issuers meet the same reality check. Most institutional buyers insist on an external second- party opinion before they touch a deal, and verifiers walk line by line through baselines, targets and data pipes. If you can’t supply meters that will track the promised savings and a plan that shows how you’ll capture every reading, the reviewer marks the deal “limited assurance”. Buyers read that as higher risk and push up the interest rate. Sustainability-linked bonds make the cost even clearer. Post-

issue, an external check confirms whether you met the milestones and whether the data trail stands up. Miss the goal or leave gaps in the evidence and the higher rate kicks in automatically.

Pull those threads together and the message is simple. Ratings, rules and debt markets have moved from applauding ambition to auditing kilowatt-hours. The distance between a neat slide deck and the raw database keeps shrinking, and every missing reading widens your cost of capital.

When The Data Story Unravels

Audit firms have caught on; Deloitte’s sweep of the FTSE 100 showed nearly half of the UK’s largest companies made restatements on climate and sustainability, with over a quarter (29%) related to errors, and errors can have major consequences.

Imagine a European office fund that proudly declares a 15 % fall in energy use, only to learn a month later that half the tenant meters never reported. When the omission surfaces, the stock exchange demands a clarification. With credibility dented, the next bond issue prices twenty basis points higher – enough to wipe out the “saved” energy costs for three years.

Maybe a pension-backed infrastructure fund files an SFDR Article 8 disclosure based on averaged energy-intensity data. A regulator spot-checks the numbers and finds they were normalised against gross floor area instead of net. The fund gets two options: reclassify to Article 6 or restate five years of marketing documents. Either way, the next capital call involves some awkward conversations.

Imagine a listed REIT that publishes Scope 1 and 2 emissions drawn from three different spreadsheets. A new sustainability lead discovers that landlord and tenant gas bills have both been logged. The board pulls the report, commissions an external audit and delays the annual grand meeting. While investors wait, a large index provider places the stock on watch, trimming passive inflows just when the company plans a rights issue.

Fines sting, but the reputational drag is worse. In fundraising, perception sets the cost of capital. Once investors smell creative equation, every future claim gets double-checked – and discounted.

Because errors rarely stay private.

Clean Data Unlocks Possibilities

Flip the script and numbers become negotiating chips. Imagine a live dashboard that pipes readings

straight from every meter, checks the units, and flags odd spikes. Presenting that traceable record to a lender often trims basis points from a sustainability-linked loan.

During due diligence, buyers love assets that come with meter-level insights. Questions shrink, legal bills shrink, and offers climb because nobody has to price in “data uncertainty”. City regulators writing carbon-cap rules also reward proof; when you arrive with measured trends instead of glossy pledges, compliance credits appear and retrofit plans meet less red tape.

Good data doesn’t just avoid pain, it earns money. It shortens transactions, cuts borrowing costs, and lets asset managers sleep on quarter-end when the disclosure portal opens.

Keep Your Reporting Honest

Clean data can’t happen in Excel. It should be collected and checked using specialist tools. A good data service should connect directly to utility providers, building-management systems, scrape PDF invoices, and pull in information from any other place holding your data. Every reading should run through thorough checks and verification steps before it appears on your screen.

When a meter falls silent, your platform should send an alert long before an auditor spots the gap.

Automated conversions should help avoid gallon-versus-litre mix-ups, and weather-normalisation

should run in the background to keep reports consistent. With the right platform, submission season takes minutes instead of weeks of copy-paste marathons, and the data behind it can stand up to

scrutiny.

Bad data is a hidden tax: you’ll pay it later in fines, rescue consultants, and lost trust. Clean data should be seen as an investment that compounds. Which balance sheet would you rather read?