One in five property investors in the UK are planning to carry out retrofits in the coming year according to new research by commercial property adviser GVA.
The study, ‘Green to Gold: Sustainable investment attitudes’, finds that 85% of property investors around the UK have committed themselves to ‘assessing’ the energy efficiency of their own portfolios within the coming year and that 20% of respondents plan to actively dispose of inefficient properties, with the same proportion planning to retrofit them.
The study comes ahead of government proposals that would make it illegal to let residential or commercial properties that do not meet a minimum energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of E from April 2018. Currently a fifth of commercial properties are below this standard.
The GVA survey shows a trend between 2007 and 2012 of investors placing increasing importance on sustainability factors within their acquisition and disposal decision making.It also states that only a third of survey respondents believe the current poor market conditions have caused a lessening of importance towards sustainability issues by investors.
Although many investors are now assessing their properties, 55% of respondents do not assign monetary values for sustainability within their investment appraisals and 80% stated valuers did not adequately reflect sustainability issues in their reports.
When measuring the importance of sustainability issues to occupiers, 69% of respondents believed sustainability issues were of ‘some importance’. However, only 10% state the issues were ‘very important’ which has decreased from 20% in 2010.
Mark Rawstron, senior director of investment at GVA said: “The difference we’ve seen since our previous survey two years ago is that investors and landlords have demonstrated a level of action is being taken. More investors have recognised that these legislative changes to meet energy efficiency targets will have a major bearing on the future capital value of their stock. Despite that, we estimate over 55,000 commercial units around the UK still remain below the required standards and if not updated will become unlettable in 2018. Therefore a huge exercise remains in ensuring this doesn’t happen.”
Retrofits will be one of the key topics at the next 2degrees Live event, 'Raising The Energy Performance of Your Properties', which will take place on 25th January 2013. If you are interested in attending please contact Matthew Eastick on +44 (0) 1865 597 640 or matthew.eastick@2degreesnetwork.com_