Elevation – Pre-Acquisition Reviews

Elevation Advisors LLP is an investment manager in healthcare real estate, with over 160 assets in 9 investment funds. As their portfolios continue to grow, Elevation has been keen to ensure that new acquisitions coming in not only align with their targets and industry best-practice, but drive forward the Funds’ ESG performance, with any risks to this identified.

After identifying Elevation’s ESG priorities, relevant EU legislation and best practice, Envision developed a bespoke pre-acquisition ESG assessment, to review potential new assets coming into the Fund’s Portfolio against a series of over 80 key indicators, referred to as Elevation’s ESG House Standards.

With each potential new acquisition, Envision are involved at an early stage of the process to assess the care home against these Standards. These include a tailored set of criteria for assets in construction and those in operation, which cover absolute and aspirational requirements across topics including Carbon, Energy, Wellbeing, and Construction Management. A review is also included of how the acquisition aligns with the EU Taxonomy.

The potential acquisition then receives an overall score, produced from weighting the Standards in line with Elevation’s priorities, as well as an overview of the performance in each category. This very clearly highlights any risks from an ESG perspective of the acquisition. This is paired with series of key recommendations, with indicative costs.

Envision has now assessed 30 potential acquisitions against Elevation’s ESG House Standards. By undertaking these assessments at an early stage of the acquisition process, the potential risks and resulting recommendations have been able to be used in the contract negotiations to deliver improvements to the assets, both prior to acquisition, and create longer term improvement plans. The indicative costings also provide guidance on potential budgets required to implement improvements.

As part of this process, Envision has also developed EPC Improvement Plans for assets identified as having particularly poor energy performance, and predictive BREEAM In Use assessments, to ascertain the likely scoring of the homes under formal certification to provide a holistic view of the ESG potential of the home.