Matt Ellis and Maureen Waters

At Measurabl, Matt Ellis and Maureen Waters are focused on bridging a major gap: The world’s largest real estate asset class — office — is also the single largest contributor to global carbon emissions.

The way to a better, more profitable real estate industry, according to Ellis, is better transactions, which will ultimately “contemplate all the impacts and risks of any deal, including climate risks, carbon pollution and so on.

“There’s two sides of the same coin,” Ellis said. “If we can have better real estate transactions, that would also imply we might have better environmental outcomes.”

Founded in 2013, Measurabl is the world’s most widely adopted environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) software for real estate, and it currently covers more than 22 billion square feet across roughly 100 countries, Ellis said.

Measurabl gives real estate organizations — as well as lenders, market intelligence platforms and index providers — the sustainability data they need to drive asset value and lower cost of capital. And, the best part is, it’s free. (As for Measurabl’s other products for more advanced needs, those aren’t.)

The company’s free software “really helps support our data strategy and helps us elevate the work we’re doing to build an ecosystem for the real estate industry, specifically around sustainability data,” Waters said. “We have everything from very large institutional customers to small mom-and-pops.”

Measurabl’s partners include the likes of brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, tech company RealPage, government-backed program Energy Star, the European Public Real Estate Association, the Global Real Estate Engagement Network, and stock market indexes such as the London Stock Exchange and the S&P.

In October, Measurabl also announced a new partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council in California to offer the state’s building owners and investors free access to Measurabl’s platform. The work didn’t stop there. Earlier in October, Measurabl announced a collaboration with the Green Building Council of Australia to integrate Green Star certification data into Measurbl’s data product suite.

“We’ve made it possible through our free business model to fundamentally measure any building anywhere in the world, and that was not possible when the business started,” Ellis said. “What happens next is taking those measurements and applying them into real estate transactions. The next 10 years is about putting the data to work, not just getting the data.”