The ideal situation for a construction company is where the house they sell has the best cost to manufacture / sale price ratio. People buy houses without living in them first, so the best strategy is to build a house that is very cheap, but is visually impressive.

Consequently, developers tend to build houses that are barely functional as such, with all sorts of damp/heating/basic liveability problems, but which look impressive.

Green initiatives are a sort of nightmare for developers, because the energy efficiency of a house is a cold, uninteresting metric that is not immediately present to the potential buyer.

Consider windows, for example. In an unregulated market, the cheapest, most crappy windows are absolutely the optimal choice for a developer. The fact that they are going to be drafty, break within the first few months, and quickly become covered in mold is simply impossible for a buyer to know, before they've lived in the house for a year or so.

Green windows, however, have to meet energy efficiency ratings - which means they must actually work. They have to keep cold out and heat in, or vice-versa. They can't be giant condensators. They probably don't look quite so pretty, and much worse, they are far more expensive. So the developer actually loses perceived property value, while paying more!