What drives the premium for energy-efficient apartments - green awareness or purchasing power?

Carolin Pommeranz and Bertram Steininger ()
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Carolin Pommeranz: Munich, Germany

No 20/3, Working Paper Series from Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management & Banking and Finance

Abstract: We analyze whether lower rents for energy-inefficient apartments reflect tenants’ willingness to pay due to a higher green awareness, purchasing power, or energy consumption costs. Based on a German rental apartment dataset from Q1 2007 to Q1 2019, we use interaction terms for socioeconomic characteristics in a hedonic regression model. We find that rents are lower for apartments with higher energy consumption, even in neighborhoods with lower levels of green awareness. This relationship is stronger in neighborhoods with higher purchasing power, such that communities with low levels of green awareness and high purchasing power show the steepest negative slope for increasing energy consumption (-8.6% from the highest to lowest rating). Thus, the rent-decreasing effect of purchasing power is higher than that of green awareness. Splitting the entire period into smaller windows, we find that the interaction effect of green awareness has emerged in the most recent years (2017-2019). This may be driven by changes in regulation, which have made it easier for tenants to assess the energy consumption before they rent, or by a general increase in green awareness over this period.

Keywords: energy efficiency; energy performance certificates; price differentiation; consumer behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D49 D82 Q43 Q48 Q51 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2020-04-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-eur
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: What Drives the Premium for Energy-Efficient Apartments – Green Awareness or Purchasing Power? (2021)
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