7 Sustainable Building in Malaysia: The Development of Sustainable Building Rating System Ar Zuhairuse MD Darus 1 and Nor Atikah Hashim 2 1 Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, University Kebangsaan Malaysia 2 Department of Quantity Surveying, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, INTI International University Malaysia 1. Introduction The Malaysian building industry has over the years been developing and working towards a more sustainable and green architecture. The needs for SBRS (Sustainable Building Rating System) become more apparent with the increasing demand from building end-user for Green rated building. This is also support by objectives of many companies today where good corporate social responsibility (CSR) calls for them to support environmental friendly including their office premises. The issue of Sustainable Building Rating System in Malaysian building industry is still new. Even though Green Building Index has been developed, but the application is only to new building. There is no study done on the application of SBRS to existing building yet. Thus, Knowledge and understanding on how the Sustainable Building Rating System (SBRS) can increase their building performance and prolong the building life span among the actors in Malaysian building industry are very low. Shafii and Othman (2005) reveal that one of the major barriers holding back the development of sustainable building in Southeast Asia is the lack of awareness of sustainability issues in related to profession. The survey conducted by Shari, Jaafar et al (2007) also reveals that the Malaysian building industry players have ‘little’ knowledge on sustainable building assessment, rating and labelling system. Due to this, many offices building in Malaysia lay to claim for sustainability. The building maintenance and operation cost increase drastically every year. The building condition deteriorate and this situation will lead to the lost of rental income by the owner .Tenant of an office building will go for a better building environment for their company good reputation. Even though the capital investment for sustainable building is very high, but the long term of operation and maintenance cost is very low. Before the system can be developed, there question need to be addressed such as: i. How do the building experts evaluate building sustainability effectively using SBRS tools? ii. What are the available SBRS tools that could be used in Malaysia? www.intechopen.com