Does energy efficiency matter for prices of tenant-owned apartments?

Abstract

In this study, we use Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) information to investigate the effect of energy efficiency on the selling price of Swedish tenant-owned apartments. While there is a large body of literature on how energy efficiency affects the sales price of single-family houses, none has exclusively focused on tenant-owned apartments. For owners of tenant-owned apartments in Sweden, heating is for a large share included in the monthly fee paid to the tenant association, which usually does not change on a short-term basis. This raises the question whether homebuyers’ incentives for acquiring energy-efficient tenant-owned apartments are large enough to be capitalized into the prices. By hedonic models and matching methods, we found mixed results. In our most optimistic scenarios, tenant-owned apartments enclosed in energy-efficient buildings are sold with a premium of approximately 0.8 to 1.2% compared to apartments in non-efficient buildings. The results in this study are not robust to all model specifications and vary across regions. In comparison with recent studies using data for single-family houses in Sweden, our detected capitalization is smaller. Our results highlight a need for targeted measures if EPCs are to be fully capitalized in prices for all dwelling types in which buyers have different economic incentives for reducing their energy consumption.