Lack of consumer demand for sustainable residential property
Developers are putting little effort into building more sustainable residential properties due to a lack of consumer demand, industry leaders have said.
People buying houses in new residential developments typically planned to live in the property for only up to five years, which limited the payback period for environmentally friendly features, CSR managing director Rob Sindel said.
“They say ‘I’ll worry about the environmental stuff when I can afford it’,” he said at a Green Building Council of Australia breakfast meeting last week.
Consumers were more interested in features such as granite bench tops, high-end appliances and automatic garage doors than in energy or water saving measures. Marketing companies that sold newly developed residences promoted lifestyle benefits rather than sustainability, Sindel said.
Developers of multi-unit residences also faced challenges to building more sustainable dwellings, Leighton Properties managing director Mark Gray said.
Like buyers of freestanding homes, people who bought into multi-unit developments were attracted to the precinct’s amenities and community.
Gray said there were opportunities for precinct-based initiatives, where measures were installed to improve the sustainability of the entire multi-residential development, but these could be hampered by service authorities.
“Service authorities are sources of great frustration for developers as they [the service authorities] don’t like change whatsoever. They don’t like individual precincts, they want control over everything,” he said.
Gray said to overcome the barriers to increased adoption of sustainable principles in residential construction, there was a need for further awareness and education in the community to boost demand.
“Unless we get people a lot younger and educate people at a much earlier age, we won’t get the outcomes that we all desire,” Gray said.
Dexus Property Group executive general manager, property services and chief operating officer Tanya Cox said the frequency of changes to public policy surrounding green building initiatives was a challenge to all sustainable development.
“Property is a long-term investment and long term investment businesses need policy stability,” she said.
She added that the politics of the climate change debate had made it more difficult for green building to gain traction.
“The conversation has changed from reducing excesses and pollution – we know that pollution is bad for the environment. Whether climate change is man-made has made the conversation much more difficult for us,” Cox said.
In addition to their roles as business leaders, Sindel, Gray and Cox are board members of the Green Building Council of Australia.