Many citizens, particularly in nascent green building markets, make suboptimal decisions in the design and construction choices for renovation approaches and new home purchases due to a fear of bank financing. Borrowing sufficiently to bring forward necessary resources to build homes properly both reduces citizens’ “Total Cost of Monthly Ownership” (loan payment plus energy, health and repair costs) while unlocking a critical increase of construction budgets facilitating ownership of the greenest, high-quality homes. Financing Green Homes with the borrower subject to lower monthly operating costs is less risky to banks which provide discounted credit without harming profits. The SMARTER project effectively communicates the benefits of Green Homes to citizens and other key stakeholders to bring a systemic solution to a systemic problem that inhibits the financial industry to design and offer green finance products and the citizens to understand and request them. SMARTER replicates a successful “Green Homes and Green Mortgage” program to 12 new countries, addresses barriers and brings green innovation with relevant research and cluster formation, adapts essential tools for administration and communication, and effectively expands collection of actual energy and financial performance to improve risk analysis with local data. Public investment is leveraged and ambitious green EU targets are supported as banks, developers, and green solution providers all contribute budgets to increase private financing for building exemplary homes. The SMARTER “Green Homes Investment Platform” guides new programs to a suitably ambitious, common definition of green investments and facilitates institutional investment by collaborating with ongoing initiatives including EeMAP and EEFIG; aligning with EC objectives such as “Mainstreaming Energy Efficiency Finance” and advancing the Financial, Technical and Behavioral de-risking championed by “Smart Finance for Smart Buildings".

BUILD UPON: Empower stakeholders to assist public authorities. 1. Provide large-scale capacity building or engagement activities: The key objective is to engage and empower a ‘critical mass’ of over 1,000 stakeholders with the process of defining and implementing their long-term national renovation strategy (Article 4, Energy Efficiency Directive). Process carried out by an important organisational innovation, ‘Green Building Councils’ (GBCs), in BG,CZ,ES, HR, IT, IE, FI, LV, RO, SE, SI, SK and TR. GBCs are multi-stakeholder platforms, formalising a ‘Regional Action Network’ of connected actors who will ensure the continuation of the activities beyond the project’s duration. 2. Target specific actors among a wide spectrum of stakeholders: The renovation stakeholder ecosystem will be mapped across the Project countries, to understand precisely which organisations will be needed to define and implement Article 4 and how this system functions. BUILD UPON has received over 100 letters of support across all its target groups. 3. Demonstrate a strong European added value: The complex landscape of renovation initiatives (both public policy and market driven) will be compressed in a living ‘RenoWiki’ resource, to enable stakeholder understanding and dialogue, and ensure all stakeholders are ‘on the same page’. The stakeholder ‘community’ will be developed through a series of nearly 80 workshops across the region at local, national and European level. These will explore collaborative and solution focused working methods to deliver the stakeholder buy-in required by government to define and implement ambitious and viable Article 4 strategies. Experts involved with the design and management of identified best practice renovation initiatives will help stakeholders assess feasibility for implementing these in other countries, to move best practice sharing beyond information to action, and an incubator for new concepts will help launch further implementation orientated projects.