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In Malaysia, the rapid urbanization that has been taking place since 1970s has made the housing development sector a key factor in the growth of Malaysia's economic prosperity. This paper aims to shed light on the performance of housing developers in Peninsular Malaysia by looking into the financial and non‐financial measures.

The organizational performance of 57 housing developers was studied by measuring their financial and non‐financial performance in the period 2006‐2008 using the Business Performance Composite Index.

The results of the study revealed that the performance of housing developers in the period 2006‐2008 has been growing in terms of profit margin, financial growth, and number of employees. Small and big housing developers were better than medium‐sized housing developers in terms of profitability.

This paper is unique because it looks into the financial ratios of return on investment, return on assets, and return on sales, which will clearly show how those housing developers have been performing financially in the period 2006‐2008.

Green building is an outcome of a design that focuses on increasing the efficiency of resources use energy and national environment. A variety of assessment programmes were developed, such as green building incentive (GBI) had been implemented in Malaysia as a strong indication for the key player in the construction industry to use the opportunity for their companies by embracing the idea of green building focussing on renewable energies, energy conservation, green building, waste management, and support service. However, the current situation reveals that the incentives were not effective enough to encourage the key players to apply the green building concept in their development. The purpose of this research is to produce a new parameter of GBIs for construction key players in Malaysia. The participants of this research were among the implementer and policy maker in helping to produce new parameter on green building incentives in Malaysia. The significant of this new parameter is to provide some guidance to the government in improving and strengthen the prior incentive, hence increase the participation of key building players in green building development in Malaysia. Apart from that, the green incentives are considered to be valuable tools in generating interest, in creating a motive for the adoption of green building practices over conventional practices and in eliminating knowledge gaps.

The existing concept in the building rating scheme especially in developing countries was more focused on the environment, economic, social and culture. The new approach of the classroom condition index (CCI) assessment scheme has its uniqueness in environmental and social aspects because of high building performance in secondary school buildings. The requirements set by the Ministry of Education Malaysia include providing a conducive learning environment, especially for students who are considered as the main users of classrooms in school buildings. Currently, the school administration needs to manually record the condition of the classroom to increase its comfort level. The lack of a structured scheme for classroom assessment makes it difficult for school administration to focus on the overall classroom condition (physical environmental aspect) in the school building. The purpose of this study is to develop a framework for classroom conditions by proposing a CCI assessment scheme for a secondary school building in Malaysia.

Mixed methods were used to carry out the study. The first stage of this study concentrates on developing a system for CCI that relates to physical elements in the classroom. This is done by reviewing the literature on the classroom physical performance, as well as a comparison between several building rating systems locally and abroad. The structure of the proposed CCI scheme is grouped into four main themes, namely, space management quality (SMQ), building condition (BC), indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and teaching and learning quality (TLQ). In addition, there are 12 categories and 23 indicators listed under this theme. The second stage focuses on formulating assessment categories with their relevant performance indicators. This phase undergoes a validation process by conducting a survey (questionnaire) toward the classroom’s main users, which are students and teachers. This is to ensure the accuracy of classroom conditions in the school building. A semi-structured interview was also conducted among building experts. They are building surveyors, building engineers, building designers and building performance experts to support the main findings in the second stage. Relative importance (RI) index approach has been applied to show the indicators weighting and ranking are used as data collections method by using Statistical Package of Social Science software to examine the RI of each category and indicator, respectively.

The findings show that prominent RI and balanced weights are formed from these four main themes. They are SMQ (19.9%), BC (26.6%), IEQ (33.2%) and TLQ (20.3%). The outcome of this study will contribute to a detailed assessment scheme for CCI at the secondary school building. The contribution of the CCI Assessment Scheme is more comprehensive and holistic than the conventional assessment process for BCs. It focuses specifically on classroom space as it is the most important area to achieve a high level of comfort comparing to other spaces in the school building. This holistic approach encompasses all types of classrooms. The concept of one tool fits all is seen as no longer a relevant adaptation in this context. This proposed tool is to be used only for the classroom (as the name CCI implies) and it cannot be used for the other types of spaces, for instance, teacher room, library, meeting room, toilet, canteen and, etc. This is because different spaces represent different physical indicators to be classified. This, in turn, contributes to a conducive learning environment for students in the school.

This paper provides the current information, knowledge and findings related to the classroom physical indicators in developing the assessment scheme for the classroom environment. It will assist both technical and non-technical experts to clarify the current condition of classroom physical performance that ideally may affect the students’ learning environment. The novelty of CCI development is not only on the adopted method but it also includes the ideas on next generation model of rating system that ideally need specific indicators and weighting to be generated into an intelligent computerized system.