On or after the 1st of July 2008, the German Energy Savings Act requires that an energy performance certificate must be made available when selling, renting or leasing a residential building built in 1965 or earlier. The energy performance certificate is compulsory for newer residential buildings from the 1st of January 2009 and for non-residential buildings from the 1st of July 2009. Since 2002, the energy performance certificate has been compulsory for new buildings and buildings that have been refurbished in a comprehensive way.

The national legislation (Energy Saving Act – EnEV) only specifies at what point in time the certificate needs to be made accessible by the owner/salesperson to potential buyer/leaser etc. The legislation does not specify the process (who needs to instruct whom to issue a certificate). According to the experience that have been made, the certificate gets ordered from owners, landlords etc. alike.

At this point in time, it is difficult to reveal the typical costs as the price is highly dependent on the type of certificate (based on measured or calculated values), the type and complexity of the building and the availability of data. We might be able to detect the  typical / average costs further down the line.

There are two variants of the energy performance certificate – a calculation based and a consumption based certificate:

• The calculation based certificate is based on a technical analysis of the building.
• The consumption  based certificate shows the actual building energy consumption for hot water and heating over the last three years.

The Energy Saving Act (EnEV 2007) allows the building owner a free choice for most buildings between the two certificate variants.

The calculation based certificate allows an analysis of the energy properties of a building that is independent of the energy usage of the occupants, which allows better comparisons between buildings. A legal obligation for requirement certificates exists for new buildings and for comprehensively refurbished portfolio buildings for which conformance to the EnEV was required within the scope of a building permit.

From the 1st of October 2008, a calculation based certificate must be issued for portfolio buildings with less than five apartments and for which a building permit was issued before the 1st of November 1977. Unless in construction, or subsequent modernisation, the heating insulation level conforms at least to the first heating insulation legislation of 1977.

There is no dominant software  to energy assessors. There  are a number  of different software application available on the German market. The typical costs depends on the individual features, the prices may range from approximately 50,00 - 1.000,00€.

Dena has built up a database in order to keep track of a certain amount of energy certificates and for analyses purposes.  It is a voluntary option to upload the issued certificates. The database therefore does not keep track of all created certificates. There might be other databases in Germany as well, there does not exist an official database where the upload os issued certificates is mandatory.