ABSTRACT

Buildings account for 40 percent of the total energy consumption in the European Union, 50 percent of all materials extracted and 40 percent of the waste generation. Moreover, in the EU more than 1,000 km² of land (the size of Cyprus) are subject to ’land take’ every year for housing, industry, roads or recreational purposes. Eighty percent of the real estate needed until 2050 is already built and industrial and cultural heritage is threatened by obsolescence, dilapidation and demolition. This means that most of the new space demand has to be accommodated in the current stock. Adaptive reuse of the existing building stock and new adaptive buildings could be the key.

Focusing on office real estate, several markets see high levels of vacancy and obsolescence, whereas new sustainable buildings are still added to the market. New buildings drive out bad buildings. Ways for dealing with obsolete office real estate are consolidation (doing nothing, waiting for better times or hoping someone else will solve the problem), demolition, within use adaptation or adaptive reuse (conversion to a different function). Potentially, 50 percent of the existing real estate can be adaptively reused into new use, but still adaptive reuse is not taking place on a large scale.

It is hard to assess the sustainability of adaptive reuse strategies. While (short-sighted) financial issues are still the most important criteria for building owners and developers considering adaptive reuse, environmental and societal issues are becoming increasingly important. Real estate impacts on sustainability during its whole lifespan, sometimes hundreds of years. This chapter aims at developing a decision-making process for durable real estate decisions. Although the construction industry is almost entirely focussed on building costs or investment costs, the real estate investment sector, more focussing on long term use of buildings, is better off working with life cycle costs, reflecting both investment and operation costs and benefits. National and international regulation is moving towards this approach. Additional deliberation on lifespan and cycles, sustainable operation and maintenance and long term real estate value complicate the decision-making process, but open to new opportunities as well. Quantification of sustainability in several methods play an important role in these decision support process.