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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]

[Display omitted] • A comprehensive overview of NZEBs is conducted by using bibliometric techniques. • Hot research topics of NZEBs are identified through keyword co-occurrence analysis. • The research trend, key journals, publications, authors, and countries are analyzed by co-citation analysis. • The thematic evolutionary analysis of NZEBs was investigated using SciMAT tool. This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of three-decade research developments in the field of Net-Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs) by using bibliometric analysis techniques. The specific objectives of this paper are to: (1) identify the most influential researchers, sources, and countries in this field; (2) identify the main thematic research focus areas and hot topics in the field; and (3) analyze the thematic evolution of NZEBs. VOSviewer software was used to realize the first two objectives while to meet the third objective, the SciMAT tool was employed to examine the thematic evolution of the field within three sub-periods (1995–2005; 2006–2015; 2016–2022). The results indicate that the main thematic areas of the field were initially limited to a few themes including 'environmental impact', 'green buildings', 'building materials', and 'fuel cells', and it expanded in the next periods by encompassing more themes. The results also showed that the field has now reached a certain level of consolidation by acknowledging the significance of three major themes: (1) buildings' energy conservation, (2) energy production and energy storage, and (3) methodological approach. Nevertheless, the evolutionary analysis points out that the field is still expanding with several themes newly emerged such as 'electric vehicles', 'zero-emission neighborhood' and 'smart buildings'. The findings offer a status-quo overview and critiques of research developments in NZEBs as well as emerging themes in the field that should be investigated by future studies. [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]