Does energy efficiency matter for prices of tenant-owned apartments?

In this study, we use Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) information to investigate the effect of energy efficiency on the selling price of Swedish tenant-owned apartments. While there is a large body of literature on how energy efficiency affects the sales price of single-family houses, none has exclusively focused on tenant-owned apartments. For owners of tenant-owned apartments in Sweden, heating is for a large share included in the monthly fee paid to the tenant association, which usually does not change on a short-term basis. This raises the question whether homebuyers’ incentives for acquiring energy-efficient tenant-owned apartments are large enough to be capitalized into the prices. By hedonic models and matching methods, we found mixed results. In our most optimistic scenarios, tenant-owned apartments enclosed in energy-efficient buildings are sold with a premium of approximately 0.8 to 1.2% compared to apartments in non-efficient buildings. The results in this study are not robust to all model specifications and vary across regions. In comparison with recent studies using data for single-family houses in Sweden, our detected capitalization is smaller. Our results highlight a need for targeted measures if EPCs are to be fully capitalized in prices for all dwelling types in which buyers have different economic incentives for reducing their energy consumption. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11356-022-20482-w.