Greenfield Shopping centre development. The integration between environmental features, building design and investment analysis at the decision making stage

Shopping centre is a long term investments in which Greenfield development decisions are often taken based on risks analysis regarding construction costs, location, competition, market and an “expected” DCF. Furthermore, integration among the building design, project planning, operating costs and investment analysis is not entirely considered by the investor at the decision making stage. The absence of such information tends to produce certain negative impacts on the future running costs and annual maintenance of the building, especially on the energy demand and other occupancy expenses paid by the tenants to the landlord. From the investor´s point of view, this blind spot in strategy development will possibly decrease their profit margin as changes in the occupancy expenses have a direct outcome on the profit margin. In order to try to reduce some higher operating cost components such as energy use and other utility savings as well as their CO2 emissions, quite a few income properties worldwide have some type of environmental label such as BREEAM and LEED. The drawback identified in this labelling is that usually the investments required to get an ecolabel are high and the investor finds no direct evidence that it increases Market Values. However there is research on certified commercial properties (especially offices) that shows better performance in terms of occupancy rate and rental cost (see Warren-Myers, 2012 for a detailed discussion). Additionally, Sayce (2011) says that the certification only provides a quick reference point i.e. the lack of a certificate does not indicate that a building is not sustainable or efficient.Based on the issues described above, the research compares important components of the development stages such as investments costs, concept/ strategy development as well as the current investor’s income and property value. The subjects for this analysis are a shopping centre designed with passive cooling/ bioclimatic strategies measured at the decision making stage, a certified and a non-certified standard regional shopping centre. Moreover, the proposal intends to provide decision makers with some tools for linking up green design features to the investment analysis in order to optimize the decision making process when looking into costs savings and design quality.