This paper explores institutional forces in sustainability reporting (SR) practice, adopting an institutional field approach to an emerging field of sustainable real estate reporting of sustainable investments through the EU taxonomy, over-layering the mature exchange field of the real estate business. We study 29 listed real estate companies in Sweden and their process towards the first taxonomy reporting spring 2022. Three companies are obliged to report their future coverage of the legislation, while 14 report voluntary and 3 choose to report their degree of sustainability, thus showing clear elements of an emerging institutional field, and its active dynamics even where law is not obligatory. Similarly, the companies’ status of sustainability was evaluated from 2022 and previous years’ annual reports, shows that 16 appear to follow each other closely, 9 companies attempt to take a leading position while only 2 appear to attempt to downplay sustainability. Annual reports tend to have a character of mechanical compliance where new insight produced by taxonomy reporting is merely juxtaposed to other reporting standards, such as Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Only one company appear to attempt to establish crosscutting learning from the many sources of evaluation the different standards and legislation represent. Moreover, legislation is likely to have limited effect as the real estate companies are only limited dependent of Bank loans, having a series of other financial means at their disposal. Many companies also had their strongest financial year in 2021 and the timing of the arrival of a financial control instrument is less opportune.