Owner organizations’ value-creation strategies through environmental certification of buildings

The existing literature (mostly referencing heuristics of the valuation profession) provides little evidence on how property owners and managers themselves perceive value creation from environmental certification (EC) of buildings. To address this issue, questionnaire and interview data from non-residential EC building owners in Sweden are gathered and related in a ‘strategy map’ that explains their perceived value creation from EC. The mapping process also considers the four standard perspectives of the balanced scorecard, prompting researchers and owners to evaluate EC in terms of its contribution to long-term strategy, measuring it according to financial and non-financial metrics of organizational performance. The study confirmed that tenant demand is an important EC driver for property owners (particularly for large organizations) and therefore that increased EC awareness amongst tenants is important for EC and for further value creation. It was found that tool developers, property owners and valuers could all benefit from more closely aligning valuers’ documentation requirements with those for accreditation with EC tools. Energy efficiency contributes significantly to value creation, but owners use energy management programs in addition to EC, possibly as a result of the performance gap phenomenon.

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