Assessment Of Homebuyers' Awareness Of And Willingness To Pay For Resilience In Chile

Residential buildings in Chile are constantly exposed to significant threats of natural disasters such as earthquakes.Resilience is a critical attribute of residential buildings,representing their capability to resist,adapt to and recover from natural disasters.The level of resilience of residential buildings is influenced by a variety of design,construction and maintenance conditions of the buildings,and it largely determines the potential losses building owners may suffer when natural disasters happen.It is so far unclear how educated are Chilean homebuyers about the resilience attribute of residential buildings,to what extent do they believe resilience matters,and whether resilience has an impact on homebuyers' buying decisions.To examine these questions,this study first assesses Chilean homebuyers' awareness of resilience with a survey.The resilience awareness is examined in two dimensions,including homebuyers' knowledge about resilience and their perceived importance of resilience,facilitated with an assessment framework developed in this study.Moreover,using the same survey,this study also assesses homebuyers' willingness to pay for additional resilience when they make buying decisions in the real estate market.The survey was distributed among potential homebuyers across different regions in Chile,with data obtained by three companies related to the real estate and construction area.The analysis of survey results showed that the lowest levels of knowledge about the property are related to the technical aspect of the dwelling,meanwhile the level of importance is high in all the items presented in the survey.Additionally,there was a clear gap between the level of importance homebuyers perceived about resilience of residential buildings,and the level of knowledge they had.The survey results also revealed that up to 82.53% of the respondents would be willing to pay for additional resilience of residential properties under three different scenarios;purchase a property for living purpose,investment purpose and living as tenant purpose.A number of factors,including age,number of people living in the current dwelling,whether currently own a property or not,type of ownership of current dwelling,whether have experienced an earthquake in the past 10 years and whether once had to repair the dwelling after an earthquake,had significant impact on the respondent's willingness to pay for resilience.Additionally,a high percentage of the respondents declare to pay more than the minimum monetary option given in the survey in order to purchase a resilient property instead of a no resilient one.These findings suggest that the Chilean potential homebuyers will not be indifferent if they have the option to buy a resilient property in the market.Additionally,this suggest that additional efforts need to be made by different stakeholders to further improve resilience awareness,promote resilience-enhanced products in the real estate market,and support resilienceinformed buying decisions.