31 research outputs found

    Real estate market and building energy performance: Data for a mass appraisal approach

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    Mass appraisal is widely considered an advanced frontier in the real estate valuation field. Performing mass appraisal entails the need to get access to base information conveyed by a large amount of transactions, such as prices and property features. Due to the lack of transparency of many Italian real estate market segments, our survey has been addressed to gather data from residential property advertisements. The dataset specifically focuses on property offer prices and dwelling energy efficiency. The latter refers to the label expressed and exhibited by the energy performance certificate. Moreover, data are georeferenced with the highest possible accuracy: at the neighborhood level for a 76.8% of cases, at street or building number level for the remaining 232%. Data are related to the analysis performed in Bonifaci and Copiello [1] about the relationship between house prices and building energy performance, that is to say, the willingness to pay in order to benefit from more efficient dwellings

    Energy efficiency practices: A case study analysis of innovative business models in buildings

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    Over the last two decades, the European Union has significantly improved its legal framework for building energy efficiency. New mandatory standards have led governments to adopt incentive measures that, in turn, encourage the growth of innovative entrepreneurial practices. This study analyzes emerging business models that capitalize on energy efficiency in the building industry. Thirty-seven energy efficiency projects - either retrofit or new construction, supported exclusively by innovative business models featuring the presence of an individual contractor - in five Central and Western European countries are considered. Data is collected on property characteristics, business environment, and energy efficiency measures. Using the Rough Set approach, the analysis identifies core attributes that associate or differentiate the case studies. They include building ownership, energy-related services to be provided to the users, and the duration for which the contractor must be involved. Additionally, other attributes - such as the types of retrofit work, investment costs, access to monetary incentives, and expected payback period - allow us to identify the cases representing best practices for each innovative model. There remain open questions concerning where the boundary between different business models lies and long-term economic self-sustainability, regardless of the availability of incentives

    Budget constraints in critical scenarios: A position paper on the challenges to improving building performance

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    This position paper aims to pave the way for a debate on a few under-explored, at least, perhaps even neglected, challenges we face when trying to improve building overall performance. Specifically, we suggest focusing on how the efforts to increase building energy efficiency, building safety, the home and workplace healthiness, and the comfort perceived by the users can be impaired by budget constraints, especially while operating in critical scenarios. On the one hand, restraints on capital expenditures by property owners and other investors affect the decision-making processes for the construction of new buildings or the renovation of existing ones. More beyond, rapidly developing demographic and other anthropological changes, as well as frequently occurred natural disasters, pose extra burdens on the players in the building industry and the real estate market. It has been a fact that the need to adapt to both budget constraints and challenging situations is seldom fully embedded in the studies focusing on improving building performance. Therefore, we call for attentions in research and publications to advocate for complementing the need

    Green housing : Toward a new energy efficiency paradox?

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    Buildings energy efficiency has occupied a prominent place on the agenda over the last decade. This study aims to assess the economic viability of improving the energy performance of residential buildings, by comparing additional costs of investment with the monetary savings achievable through reduced energy consumption. The evaluation model relies on the methodological framework of Discounted Cash Flow analysis, from a purely financial point of view in which externalities are not considered. The assessment is applied to two case studies located in Northern Italy. For each case study, several energy improvement alternatives are investigated. Empirical findings can be summarized as follows: at least partly, investing in buildings energy efficiency lacks economic viability; nevertheless, it can be interpreted as a hedge against a sharp rise in energy supply pricing in the coming years. As original contribution, the achieved findings provide an empirical support to highlight a new kind of energy efficiency paradox: investing in improving the buildings energy performance should allow a reduction to both climate-altering emissions and, in an efficient market, the price of energy supplies; but a decreasing price also lowers the profitability of the self-same investment, and acts as a deterrent to further improvements

    New insights about the relation between the cost of building materials and their embodied energy

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    Since the Yom Kippur War, and the subsequent Oil Crisis, the energy issue invaded the political, economic and academic debate. Several manufacturing sectors, the building industry as well, have since been committed to achieving a higher level of efficiency in energy use. Under this framework, starting from the end of the seventies, a specific research branch has been devoted to deepening the issue of the energy embodied in various commodities and goods, and, among others, in the construction materials. Nonetheless, during the following decades, this promising research branch has been partly neglected, due to a prominent interest in the building energy consumption in operation. On the contrary, during the last few years, the embodied energy topic has gone back to be a major research item, according to the growing awareness that the energy used to produce the buildings represents a remarkable share of the life-cycle energy. Such a circumstance is not at all peculiar if we consider high-performance buildings, as is the case of the passive house, and it has been validated by several recent studies. In a currently publishing study, we show that the energy embodied in building products, except for raw materials, is a positive logarithmic function of their production cost. The embodied energy is inferred by the inventory edited by Hammond and Jones at the University of Bath. Besides, the costs are gathered from a price list of building products, which is commonly used to arrange the bill of quantities of any construction project. In this paper, starting from the aforementioned empirical finding, we aim at providing further insights into the relation tying together the embodied energy and the cost of building materials. Rather than assuming one-shot estimates of the costs, for each of the considered building materials, we investigate their variation range. Subsequently, relying on a random distribution of all the costs within the identified ranges, we perform a Monte Carlo simulation. By running several trials of one hundred thousand iterations each, we are able to outline the probability distributions of the interpolation functions. The main empirical findings are as follows: there is a well-established relation between the construction cost and the embodied energy, so the former represents a reliable predictor of the latter, and this relation is stronger for some homogeneous subsets of building products

    Depreciated Replacement Cost: Improving the Method Through a Variant Based on three Cornerstones

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    Within the scope of real estate appraisal, the Depreciated Replacement Cost method is mostly seen as a solution of last resort, when no other option is available. Nonetheless, it is ever more useful in addressing various estimation needs. In its basic formulation, the method suffers from several simplifications that lead to rather rough results. Here we try to go beyond these limits. To this end, we propose a variant based on the following three cornerstones. The first is the partition of the replacement cost into its fundamental components, at least according to three cost items: building structure, finishes, and installations. The second cornerstone is the formulation of different depreciation curves for each of the cost items mentioned above, by processing distinct data on useful life and residual life. Finally, the third cornerstone is represented by the definition of a complex depreciation function to take into account both the original useful life of the construction and its lengthening due to partial or full refurbishments

    A few remarks on ResearchGate score and academic reputation

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    An article recently published in Scientometrics sheds light on the way ResearchGate works in calculating its RG score, which seems to be affected primarily by the members\u2019 engagement in the social network environment, and only secondarily by publications. Here we show that the will to understand the rationale behind the score should also consider the ratio between full-text sources uploaded to the repository and publications. The finding supports the claim that the RG score is not a reliable indicator of scientific and academic reputation. Instead, it appears to be much more a tool to implement the entrepreneurial strategy of the RG\u2019s owner company

    ResearchGate Score, full-text research items, and full-text reads : a follow-up study

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    This contribution focuses on the scholarly social network ResearchGate (RG). We take the cue from a recent change in the information shown on each researcher\u2019s profile page, which now discloses the number of full-text reads, in addition to the already provided number of overall reads. Building on the findings of two previous studies (Orduna-Malea et al. in Scientometrics 112(1):443\u2013460, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2396-9; Copiello and Bonifaci in Scientometrics 114(1):301\u2013306, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2582-9), we delve into the relationship among full-text research items uploaded in that platform, full-text reads of the same items, and the so-called RG Score. The dataset examined here provides conflicting results. Firstly, the number of full-text publications and reads is significantly different, along with the RG Score, for the analyzed samples. Secondly, the RG Score implicitly rewards the ratio between the full-texts available to users and total research items. Moreover, the same score seems to be affected to a greater degree by the level of overall reads. However, apart from an indirect relationship, it does not reward how much attention the full-texts get in comparison to the other research items featured in the scholars\u2019 profile pages
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