EPC Labels and Building Features: Spatial Implications over Housing Prices

Alice Barreca, Elena Fregonara and Diana Rolando
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Alice Barreca: Architecture and Design Department, Politecnico di Torino, 10125 Turin, Italy
Elena Fregonara: Architecture and Design Department, Politecnico di Torino, 10125 Turin, Italy
Diana Rolando: Architecture and Design Department, Politecnico di Torino, 10125 Turin, Italy

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 5, 1-21

Abstract: The influence of building or dwelling energy performance on the real estate market dynamics and pricing processes is deeply explored, due to the fact that energy efficiency improvement is one of the fundamental reasons for retrofitting the existing housing stock. Nevertheless, the joint effect produced by the building energy performance and the architectural, typological, and physical-technical attributes seems poorly studied. Thus, the aim of this work is to investigate the influence of both energy performance and diverse features on property prices, by performing spatial analyses on a sample of housing properties listed on Turin’s real estate market and on different sub-samples. In particular, Exploratory Spatial Data Analyses (ESDA) statistics, standard hedonic price models (Ordinary Least Squares—OLS) and Spatial Error Models (SEM) are firstly applied on the whole data sample, and then on three different sub-samples: two territorial clusters and a sub-sample representative of the most energy inefficient buildings constructed between 1946 and 1990. Results demonstrate that Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) labels are gaining power in influencing price variations, contrary to the empirical evidence that emerged in some previous studies. Furthermore, the presence of the spatial effects reveals that the impact of energy attributes changes in different sub-markets and thus has to be spatially analysed.

Keywords: energy and economic sustainability; real estate market; energy performance certificate; green attributes; hedonic price model; spatial econometric models; spatial error model; existing buildings; energy retrofitting; Turin (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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