Creative and Innovative Financing – An Approach to Financing a Sustainable Real Estate Project Environment

The aim of this study is to provide insight into how creative and innovative financing can be used to develop sustainable real estate project environment. Giving the fluid and dynamic nature of the built environment, the three (3) pillars of sustainability (social, environment and economics) are continually changing amidst a huge scale of challenges with accessing funding for real estate’s projects, especially in the emerging economies. This shortage in funding has created a need for some financial engineering to be able to provide sustainable projects for the society. Through comprehensive review of literatures, and a number of case studies. The findings show that in contemporary times, sustainable projects are realisable only through the usage of creative and innovative financing. Equity and debt instruments are often, no longer used in the traditional sense; instead they are structured to suit the characteristics of each project’s life cycle and asset /receivable cycle; this in effect could be termed a form of creative and innovative financing. The findings show that sustainable projects are more in existence in the developed economies because of their usage of creative and innovative financing in executing projects. This study contributes to the field by presenting one of the first studies of its kind focusing on creative and innovative finance as propellant for sustainable real estate projects. The study recommends more usage of creative and innovative financing in the real estate’s sector in both the developed and emerging economies as a means to provide sustainable projects. It also developed a, “project sustainability funding matrix”, which can be used as a guide by decision makers in financing decisions for sustainable real estate projects.