Green Property Services - Driving Environmental Performance and Customer Value in Commercial Buildings

The built environment has been recognized as a major contributor to many severe environmental impacts. In particular, the sector's share of the total energy consumption and the resulting GHG emissions is ca. 40% in the developed countries. The majority of these impacts are generated during the operational phase of existing buildings, which highlights the building sector's responsibility to address the issue. The focus of this thesis is on green property services. The term refers to operational real estate services aimed at both property owner and occupant, and that are aimed at improving environmental performance of the property. Customer value has a special emphasis in the thesis in order to understand the value of green property services for the customer, whether the owner or the occupant of the property. The aim of this research is to evaluate green property services' ability to enhance building environmental performance, while at the same time creating customer value. The thesis has two main research questions to investigate the issue. The primary focus of study is on green property services' ability to improve the environmental performance of commercial properties. Secondly, the focus is set on how the customers value green property services. These two research dimensions are studied at two property services scopes. First scope is an extensive property services setting. Second scope focuses on one specific service, energy management, which is chosen to be analysed more thoroughly due to its recognized significance to the environmental performance of buildings. The research is conducted utilizing a mixed method approach, with concurrent embedded strategy and sequential explanatory strategy as research design. Three cases of Finnish commercial properties were studied. The data were collected using multiple methods, both qualitative and quantitative, such as interviews, written documents and numeric data as embedded units of analysis. Based on the research it can be stated that green property services do have a positive effect on environmental performance of buildings, and they can create value for the customer both on an extensive services setting (green property services concept) and on a narrower, service specific setting (energy management). It is suggested that a green property services concept would be a viable option for building owners and tenants to improve their environmental performance, especially when they do not have the necessary resources or expertise in-house.