Green Office Buildings: A Qualitative Exploration of Green Office Building Attributes

In this paper, we identify specific green building attributes important to tenants using a mixed-industry series of focus-groups in Chicago, Denver, Washington D.C., and the San Francisco Bay Area. The focus groups reveal the relative importance of green office building attributes and further explore the qualitative reasons for those rankings. Regional preferences were revealed through differing priorities of public transportation, indoor air quality, HVAC, and other attributes. Six out of the seven focus groups agreed that green building attributes were the most important for people, compared to the economic and environmental impact of the attributes. These focus group results provide the foundation for a future comprehensive survey of office tenants on their green building feature preferences.