Along with energy innovations and related business models, there aris-es a paradigm shift in households’ investment in buildings’ energy effi-ciency and smart technologies. We argue that this shift needs to be adequately addressed in Switzerland’s energy policy. Various invest-ment opportunities especially in renewable energy sources, now availa-ble to both owners and tenants, bring about new trade-offs with previ-ously available investment options. New investment opportunities call for adapted policies, hence a need for understanding individual invest-ment motivations and barriers. We propose two micro-level surveys to study the decision mechanisms and motivations for household invest-ments for building owners as well as tenants of residential buildings. In particular we study the impact of various trade-offs on investment be-haviour across several groups of households. We apply a stated-preferences method to a sample of households including tenants. Moreover, we use the revealed-preferences approach for a sample of owners that benefited from existing subsidies.