The structural and behaviourial barriers to sustainable real estate development

Sustainable real estate development appears, on literal translation of both terms, to be an oxymoron - however it is a concept that the real estate profession needs to embrace knowledgably. On one hand it can be argued that real estate development is required for continued economic growth and the adoption of sustainability measures is required to mitigate climate change and global warming. Over the last few years there has been growth in the number of sustainability tools available to designers and operators of buildings. For example, in the US the LEED scheme enables designers to assess the environmental impact of their design and to benchmark the sustainability of the design against industry recognised criteria. LEED follows a similar format to the UK’s Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) introduced in 1990 and the Australian ‘GreenStar’ introduced in 2004. Even though there are an increasing number of sustainability tools available to designers, it still remains that the degree of uptake of the tools has been sporadic. This paper discusses the barriers to sustainable real estate development. Firstly it identifies the barriers to uptake and secondly it establishes the structural barriers in the market which prevent the wider uptake of tools.