The Institutionalization of REIT Sustainability Reporting: Cross‐Country Evidence From ESG Disclosure Regimes and Building Sustainability Policies

ABSTRACT This study examines the institutionalization and textual evolution of sustainability reporting among listed real estate investment trusts (REITs) in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, and Japan between 2020 and 2025. Reporting is framed as the joint product of two institutional layers: capital‐market environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure regimes and building‐level sustainability policies. For the full listed universe (641 REIT‐year observations), the analysis combines transition modeling with binomial logit estimation. To analyze the text of 307 hand‐collected reports, it applies term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) comparison, Structural Topic Modeling, and a human‐validated building‐level sustainability keyword index. The share of listed REITs issuing an identifiable sustainability report rose from 43.1% to 63.9%; new adoption (26.4%) far outpaced discontinuation (5.1%). Reporting language shifted toward structured, climate‐oriented, and implementation‐focused content. Asset‐level sustainability vocabulary is densest where building‐level instruments are longest established and rose fastest where those instruments expanded. The two layers leave distinguishable traces: disclosure regimes most visibly on the issuance margin, building policies on the content margin. The proposed index offers a transferable starting point for monitoring asset‐level sustainability language in corporate disclosure.