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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• buildings
• environmental assessment
• environmental certification
• management
• performance measurement
• property owners
• strategy
• valuation
• value creation

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the individuals who answered the questionnaire and were interviewed as part of this research. They are also grateful to the editors and to four anonymous reviewers whose comments contributed significantly to improving the quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at 10.1080/09613218.2016.1099031.

ORCID

Nils Brown http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9469-6023

Notes

1 ‘Brown building’ is a direct translation of the interviewee's Swedish expression ‘bruna hus' and is a colloquial term referring to a non-EC building.

2 Questionnaire and interview results alongside preliminary theoretical explanations are available in two reports available free-of-charge online and a conference paper (Brown, Malmqvist, & Wintzell, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c).

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the Swedish Research Council Formas for funding this research [grant number 2011-224]. Gratitude is also due the support of project partners Jernhusen, Vasakronan, Landstingsfastigheter Dalarna, Fabege, Fastighetsägarna i Stockholm, Akademiska hus, NCC, Schibsted and the Sweden Green Building Council.