A new Green Star pathway for individual apartments launched by the Green Building Council of Australia has neatly overturned the usual arguments about the cost of sustainability making homes less affordable. The results of a trial for the new tool show costs are just $6547 per dwelling.
Green Star for Apartments complements and extends the existing Green Star Buildings tool, providing a means of certifying individual apartments for energy efficiency, passive performance, climate resilience and indoor environment quality.
The tool mandates that all new projects include all-electric design and operations.
Apartments must also deliver higher than National Construction Code standards minimum for indoor environment quality through minimising volatile organic compounds (VOCs), ensure natural light for living areas and bedrooms, and have undertaken a climate risk and climate resilience analysis.
Another of the major issues for apartments, mould risk, is also addressed, with requirements around ventilation for bathrooms, kitchens and laundries.
“That’s the type of thing that we do check for, because those are performance aspects,” GBCA chief impact officer, Jorge Chapa told The Fifth Estate.
Also mandatory are high performance glazing, air tightness testing to verify the quality of the building envelope.
Renewable energy generation must be incorporated, along with EV charging.
Embodied carbon or upfront carbon also needs to be “lower than the building next door” both for individual apartments and the entirety of the building.
The pathway is now available at no additional cost for all developers who are registering a new project for Green Star Buildings.
The pilot, the numbers and the payoffs
The tool has been piloted on 20 multi-residential projects being delivered by developers Cbus Property, Frasers Property, Homes Victoria, Lendlease, Sentinel, and Stockland.
The balance sheet from the trial shows the cost of meeting the requirements averaged just $6547 per dwelling.
Additional analysis was undertaken as part of the newly-released Rise and Thrive report produced by the GBCA and financial institution, Gateway Bank. It showed this upfront cost is likely to be repaid quickly, and that overall, the potential gain for owners could be more than $21,000 in the first year of ownership. This figure incorporates energy savings, value uplift and potential savings from obtaining a green loan that delivers an interest discount.
Gateway Bank has already committed to being one of the first institutions to offer their green loan mortgage product to buyers choosing an apartment with the new certification.
According to the GBCA media statement, until now, in general green loan products had only been available for detached dwellings, not for apartments. The GBCA hopes other lenders will soon follow Gateway Bank’s example.
“We know that green finance is one of the key missing links we have when it comes to developing more sustainable apartments, because we know that cost is a key driver of buyers and renters,” GBCA chief executive Davinia Rooney said in the media statement.
“But the data also tells us that sustainability is increasingly influencing purchasing decisions. In fact, 81 per cent of buyers now see sustainable property features as either ‘critical’ or ‘important’ in their decision-making.”
Market attitudes
Gateway Bank undertook market research to understand the appetite for green loans and general attitudes to sustainable property.
It found most potential apartment buyers are looking for loan savings first and foremost, rather than choosing a lender due to the institution’s ethical principles. Their research also found a majority of respondents lack clarity on eligibility, incentives and the benefits available to them.
Understanding of the value of energy efficiency, however, has gained traction, with 87.2 per cent of respondents saying an energy-efficient certification for the property would influence their buying decision.
Part of a broader agenda
Chapa says the new pathway can be applied to existing multi-residential properties looking to undertake an upgrade or retrofit to all-electric, climate-resilient and energy efficient performance.
While he acknowledges this could be extremely difficult for an existing strata community due to the complexities of navigating owners’ corporations, it would be feasible for single owner multi-res such as a build-to-rent property.
In the broader context of the GBCA’s priorities, it is part of the drive to transform the wider value chain including builders, developers, owners and regulators.
“What we’re trying to do is figure out how to deliver at scale, highly energy efficient, resilient buildings that are built with lower upfront carbon materials and that are all electric,” Chapa says.
“Those are things our industry needs to learn how to do, and the pathway is designed to help people understand what that baseline looks like and build capacity, so that people understand how to deliver that … with the hope that we can then introduce that at a policy level.”
He says the apartment sector like the detached dwelling sector operates on a policy setting. That means the developers, builders and buyers generally react to codes and regulations, rather than proactively shaping positive progress on sustainability.
With Australia building thousands of apartments every year, Chapa says the only way to ensure they are all low carbon, high performance dwellings is to get the policy settings right and to have capacity to deliver them all “at scale”.
For the apartment sector, Chapa says the pathway will demonstrate it is possible to build to the Green Star standard, increase capacity to deliver those buildings, create supply chains and knowledge and showcase the desirability of these apartments.
Momentum at mass market level
“One of the things we’re trying to do with Green Star Homes and Green Star Buildings and Green Star Apartments, is we weren’t trying to define what the ultimate looks like. We’re trying to define what a hopefully good enough looks like, because what we need right now is a lot of good enough, not a lot of ultimate,” Chapa says.
“For better or worse, we tend to forget that there’s a lot of things that we build on any given year in Australia. And even if you include all the architecturally designed stuff, and you include all engineer-involved stuff, and you include everything that the GBCA does, it is actually not enough for us to execute a change unless we’re driving to a bigger purpose.”
“And for us, that example would be to influence the Construction Code, which is really the best way for us to influence the (many thousands) of homes and units that we build on any given year.
“We’re trying to define, through this work what best practice looks like, so we can move legal compliance to the best practice level, because we have to move (all of those) homes to be better, rather than focusing on just creating a few really amazing outcomes.”
He says “good enough” is what the GBCA is batting for – while acknowledging that “good enough” is not easy to achieve, nor should it be.
It can, however, be done and considered at scale, “good enough” can take us a long way towards decarbonisation if we push a significant proportion of the new homes and apartments built every year between now and 2050 to reach “good enough” standard.
“That matters a lot,” Chapa says. “And getting industry to have certainty, direction and the knowledge to do that is what we need to do right now, and that’s what we’re hoping to achieve.”