Taste Heterogeneity and Adaptive Reuse of Buildings: A Latent Class Model

Vacant buildings represent insufficiently exploited potential for urban development. By collecting and analysing the preferences of its future users, vacant buildings can be adapted and reused in the best manner and thus could generate a significant contribution towards a more sustainable development within the construction industry. Discrete choice experiment is used to identify the most important attributes and to collect the preferences of the potential future occupants choosing between two types of residential buildings, redeveloped factory and office. This study reports on the preferences of different groups of respondents such as students, young professionals, couples with children, etc. Therefore, exploring the taste heterogeneity (observed and unobserved) takes a central place in this study. Furthermore, these results can be used within a decision tool to better assess upon choice of vacant building to fit best to future desired end user. Adaptive building reuse provides numerous environmental, socio-economic, and urban policy benefits and we do provide fruitfully discussion based on the reported findings.