UKREiiF 2024: More needs to be done to boost 'green skills' in the property sector, says JLL sustainability expert

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post, she said: “There’s probably a lack of awareness from some of the smaller contractors around what green skills they need in the future.

"Heat engineers is an easy example. Do we have enough air source heat pump engineers in the UK to transition the whole of the housing stock? No.

"The upskilling is slow because the awareness isn’t there in terms of that scale of transition that’s needed.”

She added: "There are a lot of industry bodies who are working really hard on green skills but it’s also about education from an early age, learning what is the built environment and what skills are needed to work in that industry. It touches every part of the agenda at the moment but there’s much more that can be done.”

Ms Hoskyn was speaking ahead of UK’s Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF), which is taking place in Leeds next week.

Almost 12,000 domestic and international attendees will head to Leeds for the three-day event where UK cities and regions will highlight opportunities and ambitions across sectors including housing, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, technology, healthcare, energy, retail and high streets, infrastructure, leisure, and hospitality, and industrial.

Over 700 speakers will take part. The Rest Is Politics stars Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, and the Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Kerry McCarthy will be among them.

JLL is sponsoring the Future of Real Estate Pavilion at the event, which will primarily focus on discussions around sustainability. It includes a panel session on climate resilience and how to respond to climate change.

"A week ago there were flash floods in Leeds because there was a month of rainfall in a day,” Ms Hoskyn said. “We’re going to see more of that coming forward so how ready are we and what does that mean in terms of real estate stock?”

JLL is also hosting a session on retrofitting and decarbonising existing buildings.

“The market has moved significantly to make sure that the value of low carbon buildings is understood a lot more,” she added.

"But how you move into action and how quickly that happens is where some of the challenges are falling because you have to think about how you decarbonise a building, not as a standalone project but how you incorporate that into your active asset management of that building and do it in the most economically efficient way.”

Meanwhile, ​JLL will receive the keys to its new Leeds office on Monday ready for a phased move of its 80 staff over the next few weeks.

The company is moving into 12 Wellington Place in Leeds, which combines low-carbon design with new technology. JLL, which is relocating from City Point on King Street, is taking the first floor of the building, a total of 10,219 sq ft.

The firm, which is joint letting agent at Wellington Place, said that buildings 11 and 12 were the first outside London to achieve a NABERS Designed Reviewed Target Rating of Five Stars or above, an exemplar system for rating the energy efficiency of buildings.

The offices are forecast to save 407 tonnes of CO2 annually and run entirely on renewable electricity.

Ms Hoskyn said: “Wellington Place has led the way for Leeds in terms of the sustainability agenda and it’s a really good example of collaboration. To get to net zero, you can’t have a landlord doing it on their own and you can’t have an occupier doing it without an ambitious landlord.

"We’ve done our best on the embodied carbon of the building and through the interior design we’ve tried to reduce our operational carbon so we’re looking at the whole life carbon of that space, which is really important.”