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Green buildings have gained increasing momentum during the past decade, evidenced by an uptick in green building construction worldwide. To facilitate green building development, it is crucial to understand the current geographical distribution of green buildings, thereby identifying emerging markets and opportunities for future growth. However, very few studies investigated the spatial characteristics of the green building market and the factors influencing the distribution of green buildings. By examining the national green building market in the United States, we studied the spatial distribution patterns and significant influencing factors of the county-level US green building markets. Cluster mapping and hot spots of the green building markets were identified through spatial autocorrelation analysis. A spatial regression model with high performance (R2 of 0.83) was developed to identify the significant influencing factors. We found a statistically significant clustering phenomenon of county-level US green building markets. The spatial error model reveals that three factors, namely, the number of housing units, gross domestic product, and the local green building company index, significantly influence the number of green buildings at the county level. We also found that the county-level green building market is influenced by these factors of not only the host county, but also the neighboring counties. Our findings provide a useful reference for stakeholders' decision-making process concerning local green building market development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, the architecture, engineering, and construction industry has witnessed increasing growth in the green building market and continues to expect a promising future. Although companies in the industry have played a significant role in developing the green building market, scarce studies have analyzed changes in the market from the perspectives of these corporations. Also, few studies classify green building companies by characteristics. To fill these gaps of knowledge, we explored the characteristics of the US green building market from a corporate perspective, specifically investigating green contractors and design firms. We first collected data of 464 top US green building companies identified by the Engineering News-Record over the past decade and explored the development trend of the green building market, based on the green revenue generated by these companies. We found that the general growth trend in the US green building market in the past decade could be divided into three stages: a rapid-growth stage (2000–2008), a steady-growth stage (2009–2013), and a maturity and transformation stage (2014–2016). We then categorized the 464 organizations into three groups with distinct characteristics by k -means cluster analysis techniques, including mature green building companies, sector-oriented green building companies, and primary-stage green building companies. This study provides the academic and practitioner communities with a holistic understanding of the development of the US green building market from the view of burgeoning companies. Corporate-level management systems and sustainable practices of the three clusters of green building companies also provide guidance for construction companies in the various stages of transformation towards sustainability to adopt different strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]