A GRESB and MIPIM survey conducted in late 2025 recorded a shift in vocabulary: enthusiasm for the term ESG cooling, while the work it describes keeps expanding. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 assessment points to why. Sustainability in real estate now runs on cost and revenue logic rather than on political pressure.
In 2017, FMI Corp, an American construction consultancy, called health “the next disruption in sustainable building design”. Eight years on, the market data bears that out. The Global Wellness Institute put the global wellness real estate market at 584 billion dollars in 2024, growing 15.2 percent a year, close to three times the pace of the broader construction sector. The Institute expects the market to reach 1.1 trillion dollars by 2029. A 2025 University of Cambridge study, drawing on CompStak lease data, found that health-certified office buildings command rents 4 to 6 percent higher than uncertified stock. WELL, the international standard for healthy buildings, now covers close to 560 million square metres across 137 countries, according to the International WELL Building Institute. Barcelona has added neuroarchitecture to its official programme as World Capital of Architecture 2026. A topic that sat in a niche five years ago now has a place in a European capital’s architecture agenda.
To me, the difference lies in proximity to the person affected. Sustainability argues for the planet and for the future. In a downturn, that argument reads as abstract and deferred. Health argues for the person sitting in the building right now, downturn or not. Stuffy air registers within minutes. A carbon ledger stays one figure among many on a spreadsheet nobody in the room has to feel.
Regulation is moving on the same axis. In 2024 the EU revised its Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (Directive 2024/1275, the EPBD recast). For the first time, an EU directive defines indoor environmental quality as a legal term. Temperature, humidity, ventilation rates and indoor air pollutants must now enter national building codes. Member states have until 29 May 2026 to transpose the directive, and the deadline is binding. No member state has published final transposition measures yet. Germany and Austria are working on theirs, both behind schedule.
The office market is splitting along this line. JLL estimated in 2024 that the US and Europe together hold 78 percent of the world’s office stock in need of retrofitting to meet current ESG and construction standards. In Germany, JLL’s CESAR data shows certified office space in the seven largest cities growing 21 percent a year, while the overall market stagnates. Class A buildings with health certification keep finding tenants. Class B buildings without it sit increasingly empty.
Market and regulation are converging on building health at the same time, and in my experience that means the tipping point is not far off. Buildings were the last major industry where the party causing the harm did not pay for its health consequences. That is changing, because the market now pays a premium for health and the regulator now mandates it. That buildings shape health is settled. What comes next is whether implementation keeps pace with the 2026 deadline.