Succes and fail factors in sustainable real estate renovation projects

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Published Date

22-06-2011

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Abstract

Sustainability remains an important issue for the construction industry. Yet, sustainable real estate developments are still considered as highly ambitious projects. To find out how and why sustainable renovation projects actually became sustainable we systematically evaluated 21 leading Dutch real estate renovation projects. In each project we interviewed the client, consultant, architect and contractor. Based on the results it was concluded that it is not necessary to have a pre-defined (sustainability) ambition in order to realize a project that can be considered sustainable in practice. Most of the respondents indicated that the ambition developed throughout the project, mainly because of the potential sustainable reputation or the parties involved in the project. Ambitions were not set as highly as expected: about half of the respondents consider preservation of the building and recycling as sustainable solutions already. The composition, management and collaboration of the construction team were found to be very important during the process. In this sense sustainable projects do not appear to be any different than regular projects, so then the only question is: Why not sustainable?

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