tThe paper presents a methodology to define reference values regarding building environmental impacts,energy outputs, and global costs. Four exemplary Italian residential categories were analyzed, focusingon the recent existing stock and on the most common kinds of houses. Buildings were subjected to LifeCycle Assessment (LCA) analyses, through SimaPro software, in order to define specific values linkedto the environmental impacts and to the total energy spent. The amount of energy related to the usephase, including heating, domestic hot water, and cooling systems, was estimated by using the energysimulation program EnergyPlus. Building economic performance was analyzed through Life Cycle Costing(LCC) analyses, with the global cost approach. The results showed that the use phase implied the largestcontribution to the environmental and energy impacts; instead the pre-use phase was predominant inlife cycle costs. Furthermore, since a considerable amount of consistent data was used for this study, theoutcomes could be treated as reliable for the definition of benchmarks. For instance, the results indicatedthat, during the whole life cycle, Italian residential buildings could spend around 140 kWh/m2, with aproduction of about 35 kg CO2eq/m2each year, reaching a global cost of nearly 1420 D/m2

Highlights:• Business models and sustainability analyses in building projects are investigated.• An analytic process towards sustainable business models of such projects is proposed.• The application of the analytic process to a case study is shown.• Quantitative analyses can foster sustainable business models in building projects.

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Buildings currently play a fundamental role for the achievement of the sustainable development goals as they are responsible for several environmental, social, and economic impacts. Energy renovation projects of existing buildings can support the reduction of environmental impacts by leading, at the same time, to economic and social advantages. In this paper, the life cycle assessment and life cycle costing methodologies were used in a combined performance assessment applied to a case study, i.e., the energy renovation project of a single-family house in Norway. Several scenarios based on alternative energy efficiency measures were analyzed, and life cycle environmental and economic indicators were computed, i.e., global warming potential (GWP), cumulative energy demand (CED), and net present cost (NPC). The results demonstrated the close to negative linear regression between the environmental and economic indicators computed. However, the values of CED and GWP for the best scenarios in environmental terms were respectively 50% and 32% lower than the values of the worst scenarios, while their NPC was around 6% higher than the lowest values. The findings can be helpful in the decision-making context towards a meaningful combination of environmental and economic assessments in building energy renovation projects for selecting the most sustainable scenario.