For buildings in arid areas, requiring significant cooling loads, predictions of long term building cooling loads and the development of accurate Building Energy Models (BEM's) are of critical importance. However, numerous challenges and limitations are encountered in the course of generating such energy models. Furthermore, recent studies have emphasized the integration of the urban heat island phenomena in modeling building energy behavior in urban environments. This study assesses the loss of accuracy versus gain in computational effort incurred by the use of different types of simplified building representations relative to a more detailed one when applied in a building case study. The study shows that such simplification results in limited loss of accuracy, when compared to a detailed model. The RC-based simplified model reported a satisfying level of performance and was thus used to simulate the building cooling load of the case in an urban context. Furthermore, results showed an anticipated increase of cooling load demonstrating the practicality of the developed simplified model to be used in this context. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.