RENFIN

Given persistently low renovation rates and a significant investment gap, Europe’s housing stock faces a dual challenge: accelerating the decarbonisation of the building stock while ensuring a socially just transition. Among the key barriers are high upfront investments, limited access to credit for vulnerable homeowners, long payback periods, and fragmented project structures. These factors limit both the demand for energy-efficient renovations and the mobilisation of private investment. Despite a growing range of financing and support instruments – including grants, low-interest loans, guarantees, and one-stop shops – significant gaps remain in overcoming existing financing barriers. Against this backdrop, the project team identifies and quantifies vulnerable homeowners in the EU, develops empirically grounded archetypes, quantifies the investment gap – both overall and broken down by archetype – and derives targeted financing solutions to support a socially equitable and scalable renovation pathway.

To this end, the researchers adopt a data-driven, barrier-oriented approach: Using European microdata, they identify vulnerable property owners and group them into empirically grounded archetypes with different financial, technical, social, and institutional barrier profiles based on characteristic building and household features. These archetypes form the analytical framework for quantifying archetype-specific investment needs and deriving tailored policy instruments and financing mechanisms.