Earth Hour is just around the corner, and with Earth Day celebrated in April, RENTCafé decided to go green and look at the real estate industry’s take on sustainable apartment construction.
In order to see how eco-friendly the U.S. rental market really is, RENTCafé analyzed the evolution of green construction between 2008 and 2018. RENTCafée looked at new buildings of 50+ units that have already achieved or are proposed for LEED certification.
Here are the highlights:
• Arizona didn’t qualify among RENTCafé’s 15 eco-friendly states due to a low inventory of only 5,800 green apartments.
• Phoenix and Tempe are almost neck and neck, with 1,700 and 1,600, respectively, while the other cities in Phoenix Metro have 500 units or less. The only other city with over 1,000 green units is Tucson (1,100).
• To put things in perspective, the largest number of green rentals was registered in California: 55,100, or 14.42% of national stock.
• At National level, eco-friendly construction progressed in the past decade. Back in 2008, the number of new units of this type that came online was only 11,200.
• Sustainable development peaked in 2016, when 50,300 new units were delivered, then it slowed down in the following years: 2017 – 45,600, 2018 – 42,900.
