Content area
Full Text
Introduction and background
The Urban Land Institute (2005) defines green building as a practice of increasing the efficiency with which buildings use resources, while at the same time reducing their impact on human health and the environment, throughout the building's life cycle. This can be achieved at the siting, design, construction, operation, maintenance and removal stages, respectively. Green building is described by Muldavin (2010) as an outcome of building performance determined by green features, strategies and green certification. A report published by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, RICS (2005) has clearly stated that there is a relationship emerging between the market value of a building and its green features and related performance. Further, Meins et al. (2010) added that green components are expected to contribute to property value. Lorenz and Lützkendorf (2008) also agreed that green features have a positive impact upon both a building's worth and market value. Several studies have proved that green buildings have a higher value than that of conventional (non-green) buildings (Salvi et al. , 2008). According to several empirical studies on green residential buildings, it was reported that the value of green residential buildings are up to 10 percent higher compared with that of non-green residential buildings (Brounen et al. , 2009; Deng and Wu, 2014; Yang, 2013; Jayantha and Man, 2013; Popescu et al. , 2012).Over decades, numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the relationship between green buildings and building value, respectively. However, it was found that the majority of the studies were inclined to focus on the value of green buildings in general instead of focusing on the individual value of the green components which caused the building to be categorized as "green." Some of the aforementioned studies were conducted by the following authors: Dinan and Miranowski (1989), Johnson and Kaserman (1983), Nevin and Watson (1998), Nevin et al. (1999), Bloom et al. (2011), Yang (2013), as well as Deng and Wu (2014).
Despite the effects of the evolving nature of the body of research on the relationship between green and building values, several research studies have identified the individual value of green components in order to delineate the effect of each green component on building values. The underlying rationale is that the green...