Buildings need to be more environmentally benign since the building sector is responsible for about 40% of all of energy and material use in Sweden. For this reason a unique cooperation between companies, municipalities and the Government called “Building-Living and Property Management for the future”, in short “The Building Living Dialogue” has going on since 2003. The project focuses on: a) healthy indoor environment, b) efficient use of energy, and c) efficient resource management. In accordance with the dialogue targets, two research projects were initiated aiming at developing an Environmental rating tool taking into accounts both building sector requirements and expectations and national and interna-tional research findings. This paper describes the first phase in the development work where stake-holders and researchers cooperate. It includes results from inventories and based on this experience discusses procedures for developing assessment tools and what the desirable features of a broadly accepted building rating tool could be.