How the impact of Energy Performance Certificates differs in two European climatic zones

In the last years, the European Commission stressed the need to include intangible impacts generated by energy efficiency projects in the framework of investments valuation. While direct costs and benefits can be simply quantified using market data, in the case of intangible impacts it is difficult to define a monetary value. Indeed, being considered as off-market goods, it is necessary to refer to parallel markets in close connection with the asset to be valued, or to create a substitute market for the asset in question. In this study, we propose the application of hedonic price method (HPM) approach to evaluate the effect of energy labels derived from the energy performance certificates (EPCs) scheme on buildings’ market value. The estimation methodology was applied to two different cities characterized by different climate conditions. In detail, the study starts from two datasets of offer prices advertised between 2014 and 2018 in the cities of Turin (Italy) and Barcelona (Spain). The goal is to understand if the consumers’ behaviour is influenced by the sustainable characteristics of the property, and if this differs in dissimilar climate contexts. Ten different models for each dataset have been developed with the aim of capturing not only the marginal price of green buildings features, but also to control the spatial autocorrelation between transactions. Indeed, Spatial Autoregressive Model (SAR) and Spatial Error Model (SEM) have been implemented within the traditional hedonic model for the identification of the spatial influence between the properties prices. The hedonic spatial models demonstrated the appreciation for the green characteristics of the buildings in both cities, although to a different extent.