Factors influencing homeowners’ housing renovation decision-making: Towards a holistic understanding

Abstract

One of effective and efficient ways to alleviate energy scarcity and climate issues is to promote energy retrofit (ER) in existing buildings across the world. To achieve this goal, it has been demonstrated that fully understanding homeowners’ ER decision-making has a major priority because homeowners decide whether to implement ER in their homes, especially in private housing. For better unravelling the decision behavior, it is essential to have an integrative view of its influencing factors. Despite many attempts, research into these factors presented a limited set of variables, thus a full picture of influencing factors has not yet been achieved. Through a systematic review based on 47 publications, this study identified 689 factors that were grouped into seven categories. Potential relationships and common issues among the factors were discussed and further developed as a framework. The crucial roles of beliefs about ER consequences, the availability and credibility, decision-maker characteristics and social influence in shaping homeowners’ decision-making were pinpointed. Accordingly, it is suggested that the effectiveness of ER policies can be improved by harnessing multiple motivations (especially the social requirements), the power of social influence and ER effects. This study offers a holistic profile of influencing factors unravelling homeowners’ ER decision-making and lays a solid foundation for modeling energy decisions in residential buildings. Also, the research findings shed lights on the optimization of policies for improving building energy efficiency.