COMPREHENSIVE REAL PROPERTY EVALUATION, STRATEGIC PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION REPORT TASK 3.2 - FINAL STRATEGIC PLAN REPORT

This plan outlines key strategies to improve the State’s real estate portfolio. The State of South Carolina’s real estate portfolio consists of: more than 2,500 parcels of land, over half a million acres of land, approximately 7,800 buildings and more than 81 million square feet of improvements (buildings)

Impact of occupant behaviour on the energy-saving potential of retrofit measures for a public building in the UK

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Intelligent Buildings International on 06 Feb 2016, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17508975.2016.1139538© 2016 Taylor & Francis In building refurbishment projects, dynamic building simulation is popularly used to predict the energy-saving potential of various refurbishment scenarios. However, in this process, it is not clear whether occupant behaviour should be carefully modelled due to the lack of evidence about its impact on the prediction results. To answer this question, this study selected a UK public building and used dynamic building simulation to predict the energy-saving potential of common refurbishment measures, under various occupant behavioural conditions. The results revealed that for the case study building occupants’ heating behaviour has a significant impact on the predicted energy-saving potential of all evaluated refurbishment measures: when changing from passive heating users to active heating users, the energy-saving potential was nearly doubled. Although occupants’ window opening behaviour was not shown to be as important as heating behaviour for the refurbishment of the case study building, it has a specific influence on the refurbishment measure of increasing window layers: when windows are opened longer, the effectiveness of increasing window layers on promoting the building energy efficiency is decreased. According to the findings from this study, occupant behaviour should be considered as an important aspect in building refurbishment projects

Office space supply restrictions in Britain: the political economy of market revenge

Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world and regulatory constraints are the obvious explanation. We estimate the ‘regulatory tax’ for 14 British office locations from 1961 to 2005. These are orders of magnitude greater than estimates for Manhattan condominiums or office space in continental Europe. Exploiting the panel data, we provide strong support for our hypothesis that the regulatory tax varies according to whether an area is controlled by business interests or residents. Our results imply that the cost of the 1990 change converting commercial property taxes from a local to a national basis – transparently removing any fiscal incentive to permit local development – exceeded any plausible rise in local property taxes