There is a broad consensus that in recent years Australia has not built enough dwellings. A good indication of this is the very low vacancy rates in rental markets. This shortfall in housing, however, is not because, as a nation, we have cut back on investment in dwellings.
As a result, there is a considerable heterogeneity across the scores assigned by different agencies to the same firm. The problem is compounded by  the lack of transparency of the methodologies, which are typically proprietary. One of the papers presented in today’s workshop proposes a new methodology that addresses this problem by trying to filter out the noise in ESG scores.