Towards a Dutch Building Renovation Passport

Abstract

Reaching the Dutch target of a zero-emission building stock by 2050 depends on deep, staged renovations across much of the residential stock, with the roughly 1.5 million dwellings still rated E, F, or G as the priority subset for acceleration to 2030. Each stage of such a renovation is typically carried out by a different professional, years apart, so the building data generated in one stage is the input the next professional needs. In current Dutch practice, this data exists but does not cross professional or institutional boundaries. Contractors, advisors, municipalities, and homeowners each capture parts of it, and the records do not flow between them. The Dutch Building Renovation Passport (gebouwrenovatiepaspoort, BRP), available from May 29, 2026, is the policy response. It applies the renovatiepaspoort designation to the existing voluntary energy-renovation advice (maatwerkadvies) when the proposed pathway brings the building to the zero-emission standard. The launching scheme implements one half of what the recast EPBD calls a BRP, namely the stepwise renovation roadmap. The dossier half, a repository of building data sitting underneath that roadmap and remaining current across the 15- to 20-year staged horizon, is left to the broader Dutch building-data infrastructure to develop.

The building-data needs of the practitioners who would author and read such a Dutch BRP have not been documented empirically. This thesis maps those needs and elicits the practical expectations and concerns these practitioners would raise about a future Dutch BRP. The research is exploratory, centred on 15 semi-structured interviews with 17 respondents from the Dutch residential renovation sector, analysed thematically.

First, the canonical Dutch stakeholder taxonomy underrepresents the field. The interviews identify a wider intermediary class that shapes how data is captured and how advice is given, in ways the canonical taxonomy does not capture. Second, the same data fields are needed by different stakeholders at different levels of detail, with no current mechanism to deliver one field at multiple resolutions. What divides practitioners is not which fields they want (they often want the same ones) but the level of detail they need. Third, the dominant expectation is integration over replacement. Practitioners ask for an API on top of the systems they already run, and for national uniformity of minimum requirements. They do not want a new central silo stacked onto an already fragmented field.

Across the interviews, the renovation history recurs as the one category of building data that is universally needed yet universally inaccessible across actors. The renovation-history gap is the single most directly addressable item on the dossier side of any next iteration of the Dutch BRP. It is also the obvious place to link the BRP to the planned national federated building-data infrastructure (Landelijke Voorziening Gebouwgegevens, LVG). Whether subsequent iterations of the BRP deliver added value will depend on one design choice: building them around a dwelling level dossier in which renovation-relevant data accumulates, stays current, and is accessible through one route.