Is It Worth Investing in Green Real Estate? Empirical Evidence in the Office Sector of Milan

Pursuing sustainable development of the built environment is now at the center of the international agenda. The challenge to transform real estate investments from innovation to established practices, on the one hand, has to balance the need for adequate revenues and, on the other hand, to ensure affordable costs for users. In particular, investors often consider the costs of green investments to be too high compared to expected returns. The goal of this paper is to verify whether there is a significant differential in performance such as to make the green building interventions more profitable than traditional ones. Through the comparison of two financial models it was possible to argue that green development interventions have significantly higher rates of return compared to traditional development operations.