Dive Brief:
- Property owners that haven’t achieved a healthy building certification under International WELL Building Institute standards can nonetheless show tenants and investors their properties take occupant wellness seriously by earning new ratings that IWBI introduced today.
- The WELL Real Estate Rating and WELL Operations Rating are intended to give real estate companies a way to attract tenants and investors who prioritize healthy buildings by showing they’re meeting occupant wellness milestones, IWBI said in a release.
- “Our goal is to give organizations the tools to win with WELL,” IWBI Chief Product Officer Jessica Cooper said in a statement. “Whether starting with a single office or a global portfolio, the WELL Real Estate Rating and WELL Operations Rating offer the initial validation needed to demonstrate impact and meet today’s growing investor and tenant demands.”
Dive Insight:
Health and wellness considerations are increasingly driving decisions on where people work, live and visit, research shows. Providing occupants a wellness “experience” in the built environment helps attract talent, increase foot traffic, motivate people to spend more and boost employee satisfaction, according to JLL’s 2025 Global Consumer Experience survey.
Studies have also found that healthy building certifications, like IWBI’s WELL rating, can lead to higher rent levels, with an MIT paper finding that building owners could increase rents between 4.4% to 7.7% compared to non-certified buildings.
“Healthier, safer buildings improve employee retention, satisfaction and productivity,” Richard Carmona, U.S. Surgeon General during the George W. Bush administration, said in October at the IWBI National Policy Summit. “Investors and insurers are recognizing that … resilient buildings are not only lower risk, but higher-value assets. Optimizing the built environment is not just good for health, it’s good for business.”
The two new ratings, one for operations and one for infrastructure, are derived from a subset of strategies in the WELL Standard that can help real estate companies earn recognition while laying the foundation for full certification, IWBI says. For property owners, committing to WELL acts as a differentiator for attracting and retaining talents, it says.
“The ratings offer a practical pathway to measure and validate key WELL strategies, enabling owners to demonstrate incremental progress and address issues that matter to investors earlier in an asset’s lifecycle,” IWBI said.
The operations rating focuses on improving building operations and management to drive operational excellence through building systems maintenance, indoor environmental quality, policies for resilience and enhanced tenant experience. The real estate rating focuses on enhancing building infrastructure to support health and well-being to support long-term asset and tenant value.
Air ventilation, water quality and design elements that encourage movement and mindfulness are among the factors the two ratings look at, IWBI says.
By achieving these ratings, building operators can show leadership in health and social sustainability performance with results that can be referenced in global real estate sustainability benchmark, or GRESB, submissions, investor communications and sustainability reports, IWBI said. GRESB submissions refer to assessments that companies seek out to show their real estate portfolios meet internationally recognized environmental, social and governance standards.
