One-stop shops: the missing piece in the home renovation puzzle

The state of homes has a big impact on consumers’ daily life, including their financial health. Currently, 75% 
of the European housing stock has poor energy performance, leading to high heating and cooling bills, a lack of comfort and high greenhouse gas emissions. 

Improving the efficiency of Europe’s housing stock is the answer to the structural problem of energy poverty and the way to tackle high energy bills. After all, the cheapest source of energy is the one that is not consumed.

One of the tools available to help facilitate the consumer renovation journey is ‘one-stop shops,' where consumers can get advice and concrete assistance with their housing retrofit project. The EU’s recently revised Energy Efficiency and Energy Performance of Building Directives have made the roll out of one-stop shops mandatory for EU countries.

This paper presents six best practices stemming from different one-stop shops that already exist at national level that, together, can provide inspiration for others. 

BEUC members are also working on setting up one-stop shops as part of the HORIS Life project. The project is crafting a digital one-stop shop of integrated home renovation services and will support homeowners’ decisions all along the overall building renovation customer journey in Italy, Portugal and Spain. HORIS’ main objective is leveraging citizens’ trust in consumer organisations’ capability to select home renovation professionals with clear accountability and quality assurance and support consumers via a simplified and digitalised process designed around user experience.