Analysing the characteristics of green and non-green buildings: From the real estate perspective

Abstract

The Australian real estate sector has changed rapidly over the last decade. Most notably, the sector has actively embraced the notion of sustainability as it is represented by the increasing number of ‘green buildings’ across the nation’s major metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, the characteristics of green and non-green buildings and their differences have not been fully studied. In addressing this, this research aimed to investigate if green buildings pose much superior building quality than their non-green counterpart. To this, 20 years of transaction data indicating building quality, the level of greenness, and sales prices were collected. These data were analysed using descriptive statistical techniques such as the Mann-Whitney U test and the Spearman rank-order correlation test. The results show that green and non-green buildings have several different characteristics which make them distinguished from each other. Specifically, it is found that green buildings generally have superior building quality than their non-green counterpart. This raises a concern that older, shorter, and smaller buildings are relatively behind the trend of the ‘green transformation’ compared to the good quality buildings. This will inform policymakers more targeted strategies for making the sector greener than the present.