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Climate adaptation, energy efficiency, sustainable development and green growth are societal challenges for which the Facilities Management (FM) profession can develop solutions and make positive contributions on the organisational level and with societal-level effects. To base the emerging sub-discipline of sustainable facilities management (SFM) on research, an overview of current studies is needed. The purpose of this literature review is to provide exactly this overview.

This article identifies and examines current research studies on SFM through a comprehensive and systematic literature review. The literature review included screening of 85 identified scientific journals and almost 20,000 articles from the period of 2007-2012. Of the articles reviewed, 151 were identified as key articles and categorised according to topic.

The literature review indicated that the current research varies in focus, methodology and application of theory, and it was concluded that the current research primary addresses environmental sustainability, whereas the current research which takes an integrated strategic approach to SFM is limited. The article includes lists of reviewed journals and articles to support the further development of SFM in research and practice.

The literature review includes literature from 2007 to 2012, to manage the analytical process within the project period. However, with the current categorisation and the access to the reviewed journals and articles, it is possible to continue with the latest literature.

The article provides an overview of theoretical and practical knowledge which can guide: how to document and measure the performance of building operations in terms of environmental, social and economical impacts? How to improve the sustainability performance of buildings? What are the potentials for and barriers to integrating sustainability into FM on strategic, tactical and operational levels?

The paper presents the most comprehensive literature study on SFM so far, and represents an important knowledge basis which is likely to become a key reference point for pioneers and scholars in the emerging sub-discipline of SFM.

The goal of this paper is to present a description of ongoing PhD-projects as a part of facilities management (FM) research in Finland.

The empirical evidence is collected from PhD-research projects, the facilities management research sector in Finland. The aim is to identify and analyze: drivers for the research; dominant research themes; theories; research methods.

The Finnish research in facilities management began already in the beginning of 1990s at Helsinki University of Technology (nowadays Aalto-University). The research followed the embryonic phase of development of facilities management as a profession. At first the research was focusing on the facility services, e.g. problems related to outsourcing, contracting-out,co-operations. Nowadays, the research focus is wider and more scattered as a topic and methods wise.

The paper describes the situation only in one Finnish university in Finland excluding the research projects, which do not aim to doctoral degrees.

The focus is on research, but the reflections to the development of the industry as well as to the affordance in the education can be made. The results offer material for the future research agenda and also for collaborative and comparative research initiatives.

This paper provides important input to the European FM research by describing the current PhD research initiatives in Finland. The overview is useful in the discussion of topics for FM research, relevance and implications for practice, and the development of FM as an academic field.

The study aims to investigate the effects of a remote energy management service to the energy consumption of retail buildings. The study focuses on analysing the changes in energy consumption after the implementation of a facility service concept where building processes are optimized with a remote energy management system. The paper seeks to demonstrate that remotely operated building management practices, which allow high competence service for all facilities, have a positive impact, beyond traditional facility services, on energy and environmental performance of buildings.

The research analyses the metered energy consumption of two retail building portfolios comprising altogether 44 properties. Additionally, secondary data are collected from archive reviews, observation and interviews.

The research shows that remote energy management service reduced the total energy consumption during the two-year service period by 12 and 6 per cent depending on the portfolio. Electricity consumption was found to decrease by 7 per cent and heating energy by 26 per cent on the average in the first portfolio, and 7 and 4 per cent in the second one, respectively.

Variation between buildings was found to be relatively high as the individual characteristics and history of the different buildings inevitably affect the achieved results.

The study indicates that remote energy management offers an effective means to reduce the energy consumption and costs, and ultimately climate impacts derived from buildings.

The study adds to the knowledge of facilities management in context to energy management and environmental performance of buildings.

This paper aims to examine short-distance firm relocations, the most frequent form of relocation, to better understand how employees as individuals experience those relocations.

This study was a multiple-case study with five organisations that had relocated within the same metropolitan area during the previous 18 months. To understand why and how the relocation was carried out, 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted with company representatives who were actively involved in making decisions and executing the relocation of their organisation. Subsequently, to study the employees’ experience and perception of the process, 17 employees who did not have an assigned role in the process were also interviewed.

The findings show that even within the same organization, people experience relocation differently; therefore, the employees should not be treated as one object of change but as several individuals who experience change. Further, it was identified that relocation included both location and workplace change aspects.

The study is of qualitative nature and, therefore, the findings should not be generalized to individuals outside of the context of study. Instead, the value lies in the description and the themes developed in the specific context. The findings show that emphasis needs to be put on how the relocation process is managed, and that relocation change management efforts should include both location and workplace changes.

This study provides new insight on how individual employees experience the relocation process and augments the previous body of knowledge on employee experiences and satisfaction with various elements in the work environment and/or with new ways of working, and the previous studies on relocation that focus on comparing employees’ experiences of the old office with the new one.

The aim of this study is to identify and understand the role of facility services in the environmental performance of existing office buildings.

The study observes how a facilities management (FM) service provider develops its service processes to meet environmental efficiency objectives. The environmental objectives are adopted from a commonly used green building rating system. The developed processes and services are then analysed and tested against a case facility.

The results indicate that FM service processes have both direct and indirect influence on the building environmental performance metrics. The results show that, by relatively light changes and modifications to the FM service processes, quite extensive environmental benefits can be achieved.

The study is preliminary and the results are based on the single case study. Only one service provider was assessed. Moreover, the case study represents a situation where all FM services are provided by one service provider.

FM providers readily hold a great portion of the data required for green management. It can be argued that FM services play a central role in the environmental performance of an office building and FM organizations can significantly support client organizations in their efforts to minimize their total environmental impact.

The majority of carbon dioxide emissions caused by buildings are created during the operating phase of existing buildings. In other words, the way a building is managed and maintained has a major impact on the environmental performance of the building.

The study contributes to the discussion on the role of FM in climate change.

The purpose of this paper is to find out the green preferences of corporate occupiers in relation to their occupied offices. The study aims to focus on the preferences of the end‐users at the organisational level. It also aims to study the relative importance of these preferences against one another and to seek the differences between respondent groups.

The survey is a case study approach concentrating on the situation in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area (Finland) in the summer of 2009. The survey was conducted as an internet‐based questionnaire with e‐mail invitations. The importance of nine given green attributes of the office buildings were ranked on a five‐point Likert scale. A total of 90 responses were analysed.

The results show that location achieved the highest importance, even though it was rated in terms of the environmental sense only. The energy efficiency of a building was ranked second. The indicative results suggest that industry sector and the position of the respondent effect the importance of the preferences.

The Helsinki Metropolitan Area was the focus of the study, but it is believed that the results can be generalised to other office market areas in Finland.

The findings will benefit the management of occupying organisations, real estate investors and marketers who may now deepen their understanding of the preferences of corporate occupiers. The results may be useful to organisations promoting green buildings.

The mainstream sustainability research in the real estate sector has focused on green buildings in the area of new construction, and economical and technical approaches. This study concentrates on end‐users' considerations at the organisational level and green preferences in the existing office stock.

The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of the management of office relocations in Finnish organisations with a focus on the use of, and need for, external advisory services.

The study used a sequential mixed method approach. First, the use of relocation-related services, and organisations’ perception of the need for them, was assessed through a questionnaire sent to all organisations with more than 50 employees in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area (HMA). The data includes 83 responses. Subsequently, service experiences, perceived service needs, and the challenges that organisations face in relocation are studied through thematic interviews with 15 organisations that have recently relocated.

The findings show that, despite facing many challenges when relocating, many organisations do not consider using external service providers. Most organisations do not acknowledge the complexity of the process until afterwards, and they also lack knowledge of the availability of relocation-related services.

The main limitation is the population size of the questionnaire. A larger population would have allowed for more generalisations, but the results do provide insight into the organisations’ issues in managing their relocations.

In order to facilitate the better organisational relocation experiences, and to develop the market for relocation-related services, service providers need to begin educating organisations of the challenges and opportunities of relocation, and successively increase the awareness of the availability of services.

Relocation, when it is considered in the literature, is most often construed as being about location, or site selection. This study approaches the phenomenon from the organisations’ perspective and considers relocation a process that needs to be managed.

Sustainability in corporate real estate management (CREM) has been lately recognized as an integral part of almost every business. However, its perception might extremely differ in various industries. Sustainable CREM practices have been extensively analyzed in recent studies, yet real estate is an ambiguous field and the practices still lack holistic understanding. This research aimed to summarize and systematize the present sustainable CREM practices and propose a generic sustainability maturity model for CREM.

The research process was implemented in accordance with the grounded theory approach. Research data were collected in semi-structured interviews with major Finnish companies, recognized for their environmental work. The scope of the research was nine interviews.

The result of this research is the generic sustainability maturity model for CREM. It consists of 18 most typical sustainable CREM practices at the companies interviewed. The model demonstrates the value of implementing sustainable CREM.

Sustainability maturity model for CREM is an indicative tool for sustainability maturity assessment in CREM. The model demonstrates how CREM contributes to company's sustainability and provides a holistic approach towards the existing sustainable CREM practices. Additional practical implications of the model include sustainable CREM benchmarking and communication with stakeholders.

The aim of this article is to examine the current marketing situation of sustainable buildings from a Finnish real estate developer’s perspective and deepen the market’s understanding on this subject.

The theoretical part of the paper is conducted through a literature study, and for the empirical part three different green building development projects were examined.

Results indicate that the environmentally efficient characteristics of the buildings are not considered to be their major selling arguments but simply something that is expected in today’s market and thus the green marketing actions of the real estate development company were subtle and quite ineffective.

It seems that at the moment, the marketing of sustainable buildings lacks green ambition and not all are equally convinced about their differentiation potential. However, by increasingly concentrating on the different benefits of sustainable buildings and effectively communicating those to the customers, greenness can be made into a truly competitive marketing argument.

The technology needed to build environmentally efficient buildings and the knowledge about their benefits is available. However, the ways of marketing these benefits to the public and customers and, as a result, increasing the amount of green buildings have not been the subject of much research.

The study aims to examine how the vicious circle of blame for sustainable buildings can be turned into virtuous loops of adaptation when considering sustainable buildings and what are the drivers for tenants and investors regarding sustainable buildings and gaining insights of investors’ and tenants’ corporate responsibility (CR) actions.

The paper consists of a literature review and two surveys. The literature review concentrates on exploring investors’ and tenants’ CR and sustainability drivers. Empirical evidence was gathered via two specific surveys. The first survey targeted investors, and the second survey targeted tenants to determine the focus areas of sustainability.

The findings of this study indicate that the vicious circle of blame can be turned into one of cooperation with respect to sustainable buildings if the mutual drivers for improving sustainability are linked with investor–tenant collaboration. Based on the survey, the tenants claim that productivity, corporate culture and image are the primary drivers for sustainable buildings, whereas the investors claim that corporate culture and image, tenant demand and marketability are the primary drivers. Both parties mentioned the same sustainability drivers: corporate culture and image and lower operating costs. However, it was found that investors are not communicating their CR actions to public or promoting image and productivity benefits of green buildings to potential tenants.

The limitation of this study is the sampling of Nordic countries, as there are indications of different situation in other markets such as the USA.

Improving sustainability in the real estate industry is linked to investor–tenant collaboration. In addition to common drivers, both investors and tenants have their own list of benefits and drivers for sustainable buildings. These drivers are linked to each other. Making progress with respect to sustainability in the built environment depends on people in the industry being aware of the importance of and possibilities offered by sustainable buildings, as well as being able and willing to act on this knowledge. Only through partnership can the full potential of the built environment be realised and help deliver an economically, environmentally and socially sustainable future.