Jorn van de Wetering

Office sustainability: occupier perceptions and implementation of policy

Purpose – The purpose of this research was twofold. First, to investigate the views of occupiers in a typical UK city on the importance of various sustainability issues, their perceived impact of different sustainability drivers and willingness to pay. Second, the environmental and social performance of existing buildings in that city was examined.Design/methodology/approach – The research focuses on buildings of 10,000 feet2 or more that have been constructed in the Bristol city‐region in the UK over the past 50 years. The buildings in the sample are located in the city centre and in out‐of‐town business parks. A questionnaire survey investigated the views of occupiers and follow‐up interviews looked more closely at the sustainability performance of the existing stock.Findings – The findings indicate that, as far as occupiers are concerned, the strongest drivers are consumer demand and staff demand. Green features of a building appear to rank low in the overall building selection preference structure and...

Measuring the financial performance of green buildings in the UK commercial property market: Addressing the data issues

Purpose – Given the centrality of data and information to the evaluation and operation of policies to reduce carbon emissions, the purpose of this paper is to investigate potential sources of data within in the UK on the commercial building stock in terms of its physical characteristics, financial performance, energy consumption and environmental performance. The research aimed to increase understanding of the potential sources of data on property attributes, financial performance and energy use or environmental performance, with a particular emphasis on evaluating their strengths and weaknesses in terms of scope, quality, availability and practicability.Design/methodology/approach – This is an explorative, qualitative study that uses semi‐structured interviews conducted with 11 different data holding organisations.Findings – Whilst public sector organisations have the potential to provide the data required for large samples, there are major barriers to obtaining and linking the different databases. Data ...

How does environmental efficiency impact on the rents of commercial offices in the UK

The aim of this study is to investigate whether offices in the UK with an environmental label command price premiums when compared to non-labelled offices. The de facto standard for sustainability in the UK is the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM). BREEAM is a building quality indicator that investigates a range of environmental criteria, awards credits based on the degree to which these criteria are represented in a building and then awards a rating based on the total number of credits that have been achieved. This research investigates the effect of BREEAM ratings on observed contract rents in the UK and as such provides a potentially stronger empirical test of the hypothesis than previous appraisal-based studies. The market impact of BREEAM ratings is investigated, using a control sample of non-BREEAM-rated office buildings throughout the UK. To achieve this, a data set is used that contains 19,509 commercial office lease transactions that were completed from 2006 to 2010. The results indicate that a premium exists for BREEAM-certified buildings. The results also indicate that the premium shows variations during the study period and that premiums vary depending on the year of construction and certification.