Romanian real estate investor develops new standard that certifies office building resilience to pandemic

Liviu Tudor, one of Romania's biggest office owners, has developed a new standard that certifies the resilience of office buildings to a pandemic or similar risks. He has launched the IMMUNE Building Standard open-source, aiming to help office building owners worldwide regain their tenants' trust in this difficult market context generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As work from home has become the new norm among white-collar employees worldwide, office building owners are looking to convince companies to bring their employees back to the office.

"The pandemic has radically changed the way we live, work, and interact. Excepting hospitals, clinics, and 'clean rooms' dedicated to scientific research, no other building is prepared to face a pandemic challenge like Covid-19. Since people are spending up to 90% of their time indoors, the need to redesign and reengineer the built environments, mainly responsible for our health, becomes more and more articulated in order to obtain resilience to pandemic events as well as future bacteriological or toxicological threats," explained Liviu Tudor, founder and president of Genesis Property, and president of the European Property Federation.

Genesis Property owns the West Gate Business District and Novo Park office buildings in Bucharest, with a total gross leasable area of 150,000 sqm.

"Just as we take care of our immune system and constantly seek to boost it, there is a need for solutions to improve the immunity of the buildings in which we spend most of our time and to prepare them for the new normality. This is how the IMMUNE concept was created, with the mission to boost the immunity of office buildings and design the healthy environment in which we will work in the future," he added.

The IMMUNE Building Standard was developed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in a very short timeframe, following a EUR 1 million investment in research, development, and implementation. A team of 20 experts in health, technology, architecture, constructions, engineering, and facility management in Romania worked on defining this standard.

The IMMUNE standard is inspired by technologies and procedures developed and successfully applied in hospitals and medical clinics, adapted for offices. It is based on an index of over 100 measures recommended for implementation in buildings, which include technical solutions for architectural engineering, technology, design, and operational practices applied permanently or ready to activate in specific risk scenarios.

Some of the measures are a premiere for office building occupants and could prove instrumental in ensuring the security and health of workplaces of the future. Among these are IMMUNE Stewards, designated representatives in each building to ensure the implementation and monitoring of activities for the safety and health of people, as well as for the design of spaces, an IMMUNE Quarantine space – a dedicated area designed, fully equipped, and ready to use in case of the immediate need to isolate exposed people –, and an Emergency IMMUNE Warehouse which is a rapid and effective relief logistic system for pandemic-response. Specific protective materials will permanently be deposited there, including personal protective equipment. The IMMUNE Steward will be responsible for maintaining the stock and distributing all materials needed in the building for all occupants' safety.