Building communities: reducing energy use in tenanted commercial property

Abstract

Reducing energy use in tenanted commercial property requires greater understanding of 'buildings as communities'. Tenanted commercial properties represent: (1) the divergent communities that share specific buildings and (2) the organisational communities represented by multi-site landlord and tenant companies. In any particular tenanted space the opportunity for environmental change is mediated (hindered or enabled) through the lease. This discussion draws on theoretical and practical understandings of (i) the socio-legal relationships of landlords, tenants and their advisors; (ii) the real performance of engineering building services strategies to improve energy efficiency; (iii) how organisational cultures affect the ability of the sector to engage with energy efficiency strategies; and (iv) the financial and economic basis of the relationship between owners and occupiers. The transformational complexity stems from: (i) the variety of commercial building stock; (ii) the number of stakeholders (solicitors, investors, developers, agents, owners, tenants and facilities managers); (iii) the fragmentation within the communities of practice; and (iv) leasehold structures and language. An agenda is proposed for truly interdisciplinary research that brings together both the physical and social sciences of energy use in buildings so that technological solutions are made effective by an understanding of the way that buildings are used and communities behave.

The evolution of green leases: towards inter-organizational environmental governance

“…The literature on corporate environmental governance (CEG) and voluntary environmental programmes (VEPs) provides some guidance, but it also has some gaps. To address more fully the role of leases in tenanted property, the CEG and VEP concepts are augmented with perspectives on 'middle-out' change (Janda & Parag, 2013;Parag & Janda, 2014), 'building communities' (Axon, Bright, Dixon, Janda, & Kolokotroni, 2012), and strategic property management (Edwards & Ellison, 2004).…”

Energy-related standards and UK speculative office development

“…The link between energy efficiency or green certification and higher rents is, however, taken for granted in the industry and evidenced as a 'willingness to pay' for a certified 'eco-label' (Fuerst & van de Wetering, 2015). Such forms of green certification have indeed been found globally to correlate with a (small) rental price premium (Fuerst & McAllister, 2011a;Wiley, Benefield, & Johnson, 2010) used to support this model (Axon et al, 2012;Fuerst, van de Wetering, & Wyatt, 2013). This willingness to pay is potentially self-fulfilling, with the most recent meta-analysis of US data (Fuerst, Gabrieli, & McAllister, 2017) finding that 'eco-investors' pay the most for environmentally certified properties.…”

“…(Not) delivering speculatively built lowerenergy offices A better understanding of the energy efficiency of specifically commercial office buildings has previously been identified as a research gap (Axon, Bright, Dixon, Janda, & Kolokotroni, 2012;Nicholls, 2014;Oreszczyn & Lowe, 2009), although recent studies have contributed much to knowledge, focusing particularly on benchmarking (Hsu, 2014), the performance gap (Cohen & Bordass, 2015;De Wilde, 2014;Fedoruk, Cole, Robinson, & Cayuela, 2015;Lewry, 2015;van Dronkelaar, Dowson, Spataru, & Mumovic, 2016), the accuracy of building assessment methods (see below), effects on rent and sale values (Kontokosta, 2013) and behavioural influences and interventions (Hong & Lin, 2014;Mulville, Jones, Huebner, & Powell-Greig, 2016;Tetlow, van Dronkelaar, Beaman, Elmualim, & Couling, 2015).…”

Beyond feedback: introducing the ‘engagement gap’ in organizational energy management

“…The presence or absence of these three variables can be used to recognize variation within organizations and potentially map different policy approaches to encourage energy efficiency or conservation. Janda (2014) further developed the 3Cs framework with a 'building communities' approach based on Axon, Bright, Dixon, Janda, and Kolokotroni (2012), augmenting it from 3Cs to 4Cs, as shown in Table 1.…”