Analysis of the Portuguese building retrofitting market

Abstract

The Portuguese socio-economic context of the last decades of XX century led to a great investment by the construction industry in new construction. This tendency continued even after the number of buildings had largely overcome the number of families. Nowadays, there are in Portugal more 45% of dwellings than families. On the other hand, the existing buildings were several times built without a proper consideration of important issues, such as thermal comfort, acoustic comfort, ventilation needs, natural lighting, among many others. For these reasons, many Portuguese buildings have big retrofitting needs. This study intends to present a statistical analysis of the Portuguese residential buildings retrofitting needs. Additionally, it was intended to study in what extent the retrofitting works currently being carried out overcome these needs. This analysis was made based on collected data from a survey responded by construction companies operating in Portugal.