What will you pay for an 'A'? - a review of the impact of building energy efficiency labelling on building value

摘要

Energy labelling of buildings to rent or buy has been widespread in OECD countries for over a decade. The main objective is to help occupiers to make an informed choice in their building selection; a desired secondary impact of this is to increase the market value of more efficient buildings and hence provide an incentive to supply them.The EPBD has provided the main mechanism in the EU; it required Member States (MSs) to introduce building labels, Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), to be available to renters and buyers at the point of legal agreement. A DG Energy commissioned report on the impact of EPCs was published in 2013 (Mudgal et al 2013).Since then a new requirement was added in the 2010 recast of the EPBD; the EPC has to be included in advertisements of buildings to let or buy. Also, a plethora of new reports and papers have been published on the impact of building labelling in the EU, possibly due to large volumes of data on property transactions and building efficiency becoming more available.This paper has reviewed recent research on residential property in Europe, examining 15 papers covering 15 countries. The main finding is that the initial deduction that higher energy efficiency results in higher property prices is confirmed: all but one study found that to be the case, over a wide range of climates, and at different scales e.g. cities, regions and countries.The review has also illustrated how difficult it is to do these investigations - detailed data are needed to eliminate the effect of factors which could co-correlate with energy efficiency and muddy the results. Further, the use of multiple factors requires large samples in order to get significant results. More studies and analysis need to be done to draw more far-reaching conclusions.