Sustainable housing

Making housing sustainable is key to tackling the climate challenge. The reality is that today a significant share of CO2 emissions come from the built environment, and a significant share of that comes from people’s homes. To achieve the global goals of the Paris Agreement - and to deliver on the Netherlands’ commitment to net zero - housing emissions in the country have to be reduced and rapidly.

There are two routes to making houses future-fit. One is to ensure that new builds don’t add to the carbon footprint. The other – and the harder part of the task – is to renovate homes that already exist to make them more energy efficient and sustainable. 80% of the housing stock predicted to be here in 2050 is already around today, so we’ve chosen to focus our efforts on that.

Sustainable housing matters

ING finances hundreds of thousands of homes in the Netherlands. That gives us the opportunity to find new ways to enable people make their homes more sustainable and future-proof. It matters to our customers because improving energy efficiency can help to reduce their household expenditure, improve the comfort of their home and increase the value of their asset for the long term. Meanwhile, for us as a bank, it’s important we manage the climate risk of our mortgage portfolio – while meeting our commitment to steer our lending book towards net zero. It matters to society more broadly because, as the latest climate science tells us, the imperative for all of us to step up action on climate is growing ever more urgent.

Making it affordable

First and foremost, for people to upgrade their homes for sustainability, it must be affordable. The cost of living is putting pressure on household budgets - but becoming more energy efficient can lower monthly bills and help control costs in the years ahead. With housing regulations coming in across Europe, homes that don’t match the new energy performance standards are expected to lose value over time. Yet, as the data already shows, those that improve energy performance, will increase in value. That’s not cash in hand today, but making your home more sustainable will increasingly become part of people’s financial health.

Making it easy

We’ve also learned a lot about the hurdles people face in retrofitting for sustainability. The process is complicated and cumbersome: people don’t know where to start; what’s needed or how it all fits together; how to find the contractors to do it or what financing and subsidies are available.

So, we asked ourselves: what if we could help to make that experience much simpler? That led us to creating ING Upgrader, a new and innovative approach to joining everything up for customers.

As a way to get started, we offer the Upgrade Check, a digital tool which enables people to understand the possibilities. We established a new partnership with Winst uit je Woning, an organisation that connects homeowners to contractors across the construction industry. And we’ve designed a 5-Step end-to-end solution – that includes an expert visiting people in their homes to develop a personalised plan; advice on financing – whether that’s with ING or not; access to reliable installers to deliver the plan and, at the end of the renovation process, a free upgraded energy label. So, whether what’s needed is insulation, a heat pump or solar panels, we are aiming to make the entire journey much easier and staying alongside customers every step of the way.

At ING, we want to make it the new normal in our society that upgrading your home naturally includes making it sustainable and future-fit.

Society is transitioning to a low-carbon economy. So are our clients, and so is ING. We finance a lot of sustainable activities, but we still finance more that’s not. See how we’re progressing on ing.com/climate.

For more information download the press release: ING introduces ING Upgrader for sustainable and future proof living