Description

A leading real estate player in French-speaking Switzerland, Retraites Populaires manages a significant portfolio composed of its own buildings and assets administered for partner institutions. In a context of portfolio growth, proactive renovation, and increased sustainability requirements, the institution has recently established a Sustainability Unit attached to the Real Estate Division. To structure practices and make procurement, reuse, and resource management genuine levers of environmental and asset performance, Retraites Populaires has commissioned us to find its future

Sustainable Procurement & Circular Economy Expert

A newly created position to build a sustainable, concrete, and economically sound approach

Your responsibilities

Within a small team, you contribute to translating sustainability ambitions into concrete, measurable, and economically relevant actions within real estate projects. You conduct an assessment of existing practices across various departments, identify needs and priority areas for improvement, then participate in defining a pragmatic and operational roadmap. Your priority is to structure a sustainable procurement policy applied to the Real Estate Division, with a direct impact on material choices, reuse, and resource management. You develop the criteria, tools, indicators, and processes necessary to support project managers, contractors, companies, and suppliers in their decision-making. You also implement pilot projects with the aim of testing, measuring, and then generalising best practices before their deployment across the real estate portfolio. In doing so, you help lay the foundations for a structured and reproducible approach, which could be extended to other areas of the institution.

Your profile

You have significant experience in real estate renovation, ideally gained with a major property owner or asset manager. You understand the life cycle of a building, its operational constraints, and the challenges of asset enhancement. Aware of sustainability issues, you know how to integrate concepts of reuse, circular economy, embodied energy, and sustainable materials in a concrete and structured approach. You are able to promote and justify these choices with solid economic arguments, taking into account CAPEX/OPEX trade-offs, operating costs, regulatory risks, and long-term value creation. Pragmatic, credible, and possessing excellent interpersonal skills, you interact with diverse stakeholders and know how to unite and convince without having direct hierarchical authority. Holding a higher education degree in construction, environmental engineering, construction economics, or an equivalent field, you have supplemented your background with significant training related to sustainability.