Existing sustainable renovation concepts for single-family houses

In the Nordic Innovation Centre Project, SuccessFamilies, the main objective is to change the business environment in order to speed up the implementation of sustainable renovation of single-family houses – proposing new service concepts that will combine both the technical solutions, financing services as well as other promoting issues to overcome the behavioural, organizational, legal and social barriers that exist in sustainable renovation.

A starting point for such a change has been to get an overview of the existing sustainable renovation concepts, i.e. full-service concepts and technical concepts. The paper describes a few Nordic examples of full-service models for renovation of single-family houses which entered the market recently and the provisional success of these concepts.

The existing Nordic single-family house renovation market is dominated by a craftsman based approach with individual solutions, traditional warehouses ”do-it-yourself-shops” and some actors marketing single products. To speed up the implementation of sustainable renovation of single-family houses there is a great need for full-service packages.

Existing technical renovation concepts, typically focusing on application of only a few of the available technical solutions, have not been successful in realizing large scale energy efficiency gains.