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ASTM Publishes Standards for Property Resilience Assessments

November 5, 2024

On November 4, ASTM International published its eagerly anticipated Standard Guide for Property Resilience Assessments (PRAs).

The guide, in development since April 2021, aims to help real estate investors, owners, operators, and lenders better understand the natural hazards that may affect a property today or in the future.

• PRAs can be performed alongside other important ASTM assessments, such as the E1527 Phase I Environmental Site Assessment and E2018 Property Condition Assessment, as part of an organization's property-level due diligence process.

Why it matters: Standardizing data and information is increasingly vital for assessing climate-related impacts on commercial real estate.

• CREFC is developing a climate-related due diligence tool for lenders and investors to use when assessing properties backing potential loans or investments.
• The ASTM Standard Guide for PRAs will be an important input into this process.

Holly Neber of AEI Consultants chaired the effort, with other participants drawn from a variety of sectors, including:

• Engineering, architecture, earth sciences, climate science, and climate risk modeling;
• Property insurance;
• Law, finance, and financial risk management; and
• Construction and development, property ownership, investment, management, and consulting.

According to Neber:

“We brought different insights to the question of how to perform these assessments, but the one common theme was that we needed to work together because the demand for answering these questions was growing, and we needed a common language and framework to do that work together.”

As described in ASTM Standardization News, the guide “establishes a generalized, systematic approach to the assessment process” via three stages:

• Stage 1: identifying natural hazards likely to affect a property;
• Stage 2: evaluating site-specific risks posed by these hazards, as well as the capacity of the property to absorb and recover from them; and
• Stage 3: identifying potential conceptual resilience measures to enhance property-level performance, if needed.

Neber notes that the work will continue: 

“Smaller teams from our task group will also begin working on practices to emerge from the guide. ASTM is such a great forum for all these different perspectives to come together and find common ground.”

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