About Us

Our structure

Beacon invested in research and development to underpin solutions to enhance the sustainability of New Zealand’s residential built environment and drive market change.  Our research focused on meeting the needs of four channels to the market – consumers, industry, infrastructure and central / local government.  Beacon consulted key stakeholders across central, regional and local government, infrastructure, industry and consumers to identify what is required to maximise uptake of sustainable housing.

Beacon Operating Model - Flowchart

We identified three areas of research as the priorities to create change:

  1. Neighbourhoods
  2. Existing homes
  3. New homes 

We conducted large scale demonstration and research projects in these areas, focused on meeting the needs of the four channel audiences, identifying gaps requiring further research, and creating lasting market transformation.

Supporting the major projects was Beacon’s core research activity focusing on energy, water, materials and indoor environment quality.

Each area of research concentrated on:

  • clarifying best practice (e.g. who should do what, when and how, to build/renovate a home so it performs sustainably)
  • establishing value cases (e.g. what is the value of warmer, drier homes and to whom?)
  • assessing technologies
  • identifying opportunities to innovate, providing tools to support change (e.g. guidelines, checklists, spreadsheet models, specifications etc.)

Common threads running across all research activity were market transformation (mechanisms to stimulate both supply push and demand pull) and policy and regulation (supportive ‘rules’ governing building and renovating for sustainability).