Quantifying the Financial Benefits of Multifamily Retrofits

Increasing the adoption of energy-efficient building practices will require the energy sector to increase its understanding of the ways that retrofits affect multifamily financial performance and how the lending and appraisal industries interpret those indicators. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America research team Partnership for Advanced Residential Retrofit analyzed building, energy, and financial program data as well as other public and private data to examine the relationship between energy efficiency retrofits and financial performance on three levels: building, city, and community.

The project goals were to increase the data and analysis in the growing body of multifamily financial benefits work and to provide a framework for other geographies to produce similar characterization. The goals are accomplished through three tasks. Task 1: A pre- and post-retrofit analysis of 13 Chicago multifamily buildings. Task 2: A comparison of Chicago income and expenses to two national data sets. Task 3: An in-depth look at multifamily market sales data and the subsequent impacts of buildings that undergo retrofits.