Topic Real Estate and Housing

Thermal Efficiency Retrofit of Residential Buildings: The German Experience

The German government has committed to reducing the primary energy demand of buildings by 80% by 2050. Achieving this reduction will require foremost efficiency improvements, with a first milestone of a 20% reduction in heat demand levels by 2020. Given that about 80% of today's building stock will remain in place beyond 2050,thermal retrofit of this existing building stock is essential (Figure 1). ...

Meeting Energy Concept Targets for Residential Retrofits in Germany: Economic Viability, Financial Support, and Energy Savings

In the 2010 Energy Concept, the German government committed to reducing the primary energy requirement of buildings by 80% by 2050 and to increase the thermal retrofit rate from 0.8% to 2% per year. The 2% target is less than the 3%1 rate at which outer walls are currently being renovated each year, so it is achievable even if the government only targets buildings that are already planning a renovation. ...

Using Tax Incentives to Support Thermal Retrofits in Germany

The German government has committed to reducing the primary energy demand of buildings by 80% by 2050 and to attaining a thermal retrofit rate of 2%. Achieving both goals will require deep thermal retrofits across the existing building stock. To meet this challenge, the government is exploring what role tax support options could play in encouraging thermal retrofits and ensuring that they deliver the ...

Drivers of Thermal Retrofit Decisions: A Survey of German Single- and Two-Family Houses

The German government is committed to reducing the primary energy demand of buildings by 80% by 2050. This requires increasing the rate of thermal retrofits from the current 0.8% to 2.0% per year. To explore how new and existing policies and programs could deliver the increased retrofit rate, this paper examines the thermal efficiency retrofit decision-making process among owners of single- and two-family ...

An Early Warning System to Predict the House Price Bubbles

In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one that provides the highest concordance between these two techniques. In addition, we suggest an early warning ...

Is there a Bubble in the Chinese Housing Market?

Methodologies for Assessment of Building's Energy Efficiency and Conservation: A Policy-Maker View

Recent global peer-review reports have concluded on importance of buildings in tacking the energy security and climate change challenges. To integrate the buildings energy efficiency into the policy agenda, significant research efforts have been recently done. More specifically, the public domain provides a bulk of literature on the application of buildings-related efficiency technologies and behavioural ...

Is There a Bubble in the Chinese Housing Market?

For many analysts, the Chinese economy is spurred by a bubble in the housing market, probably driven by the fiscal stimulus package and massive credit expansion, with pos-sible adverse effects to the real economy. To get insights into the size of the bubble, the house price evolution is investigated by panel cointegration techniques. Evidence is based on a dataset for 35 major cities. Cointegration ...

What Drives Housing Prices Down? Evidence from an International Panel

In this study, we suggest an explanation for the low growth rates of real housing prices in Canada and Germany in comparison to other OECD countries over the period 1975-2005. We show that the long-run development of housing markets is determined by real disposable percapita income, the real long-term interest rate, population growth, and urbanization. The differential development of real housing prices ...

Building Sector: Stimulus Packages Make an Impact

The sharp slump of the German economy has left its mark on the building sector. Commercial construction has been especially affected by the significant decline in companies' propensity to invest - triggered by the macroeconomic downturn. However, due to the stable development of real wages and the overall labour market as well as targeted supporting programmes, the recession has more or less bypassed ...