Green building index consultancies acceptance amongst stakeholders in residential building development

Sustainable or ―green‖ building construction technology has been fully integrated into the Malaysian construction industry. Despite the awareness and several government initiatives to develop and promote the concept, developers rarely engage the services provided by green building consultants in their projects. Most developers are still not keen to invest in the green building initiative due to their worries on the consultancies and construction implementation cost overrun. Due to this factor, there is an imperative need to ascertain the current level of acceptance of the green building consultancies based on the industries experts‘ opinions. The study aims to examine the level of developers‘ acceptance on the current services provided by GBI consultants in the Malaysian construction industry and how it assists in improving green building practices in Malaysian residential buildings. A questionnaire Survey was carried out on 150 respondents of architect, contractors, projects managers, quantity surveyor who were directly involved in green buildings. Meanwhile, an indepth interview was also conducted on eighteen interviewees amongst professionals and regulators to seek their views on barriers and strategies to improve green building consultancy in residential buildings in Malaysian construction industry. The results from the survey were analyzed with Statistical Package for The Social Science(SPSS) for statistical analysis, while the interviews utilizes discourse analysis. The analysis of this study demonstrates that the level of acceptance of GBI consultancies among developers was still low. The acceptance factors such as management and administration, quality of design, time effectiveness, quality of results and compliance to GBI requirements significantly influenced cost during the early design stages of residential green buildings. Furthermore, the cost implementations were very high due to ineffective time management. To counter this issue, increasing the competencies and knowledge in green buildings amongst the part of the consultants and clients and incorporating new green technologies are the major drivers to improve GBI consultancies. The study provides valuable contribution to the pertinent discourse on green building practices in Malaysia by revealing the current concerns of stakeholders and assists the government policy system to promote the practices. Despite the low participation, Malaysian building industry stakeholders were observed to have an understanding of the need to embrace and improve GBI consultancy and mitigate the barriers to its implementation.

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