The Certified Rental Building Program (CRBP) announced it is now a national brand, known as the Canadian Certified Rental Building Program. Launched in 2008 by the Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario (FRPO), the first-of-its-kind program was designed to promote and acknowledge quality for Ontario rental housing consumers, and professionalism for multi-residential property managers and owners. In 2015, the program expanded into BC with help from local association, LandordBC.
“The benefits of this expansion are two-fold,” said Ted Whitehead, CCRBP Director of Certification. “This new program will cultivate a national community of CRB-approved apartment buildings to provide Canadian renters with peace of mind and a clear ‘quality assurance’ alternative when selecting their rental apartment home. The national program also provides apartment owners and managers with a unique grass-roots ESG perspective that multi-res organizations can easily communicate with their staff and residents.”
At the heart of the Canadian Certified Rental Building Program are 54 standards of practice, and hundreds of requirements to which all organizations and buildings must adhere. Together these translate the concepts of environmental, social and governance into concrete ESG measures that will lead to enhanced corporate accountability.
In the competitive real estate marketplace, internationally recognized ESG benchmark programs like GRESB are taking on increased relevance and importance. According to Whitehead, not only can CRB certification help enhance an organization’s GRESB benchmarking score, but now, in line with its national expansion, the CRBP has moved from a recognized and approved green building certification program to officially becoming a GRESB Real Estate partner.
“With many of the REITs, institutional, and investor-driven members leading the multi-res industry’s transformation to an ESG discipline, it became imperative to undertake expansion of CRBP across the Canadian landscape to support their needs,” added Tony Irwin, FRPO President & CEO. “As all levels of government gain greater awareness of the ESG mantra across all industries, there is little doubt that they will soon be asking – or perhaps, demanding – what our industry is doing collectively on this front. Ours is the foremost ESG-focused accreditation program supporting the multi-residential industry.”
Currently, the multi-res industry provides apartment homes to one in three Canadians, or approximately 4.4 million people. Nearly 13 per cent of multi-res companies in Canada have adopted a formal ESG program to date, a number that’s expected to grow significantly in the coming years.
