ShareThisWhat Else Don’t You Know About Your Home?
With the downturn in the housing market many builders and developers are looking for creative solutions to weather the storm. This has resulted in a number of different tactics by builders including a focus on the remodel market, building at the lowest possible cost, building green or high performance homes, or just getting out of the industry all together.
Arguably, one of the most interesting approaches builders have used to differentiate themselves is embracing transparency, allowing the homebuyer to truly understand what they are purchasing. Builders have begun to use green building certifications and energy performance scores as tools to achieve this more transparent message. By bringing progressive construction features into the foreground, builders are creating a new set of buying criteria not seen before in the residential market. The measures they are highlighting -- that improve energy efficiency, durability, and improve air quality -- should be important to consumers. Many of America’s leading builders, such as KB Homes, are making this case to their buyers every day.
Cost Per Square Foot – so 1900s!
Evaluating a home based on cost per sq. foot is still unfortunately the conventional practice, but it’s a rabbit hole. Just like with every manufactured product there are always inexpensive options that accomplish seemingly similar results. Building homes is no different. With every decision a builder makes there are cheap, affordable, sensible, premium, expensive and excessive buying options.
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The trick to building an affordable, marketable home is making the correct decisions in every step of the building process. Building a true high performance home allows builders to showcase their decisions, pulling back the curtain on the construction process and enabling the buyer to see what’s behind the walls of the most significant investment they will potentially ever make. Such an approach takes the focus off of the superficial features that are easy to see like stainless steel and granite, and puts it back on value. Take a look at what Ideal Homes is doing in Oklahoma.
Showcasing the Invisible for Savvy Buyers
Building High Performance Homes is as much about process as it is about products and these processes can be explained to homebuyers. Through process and techniques alone, a home’s efficiency can be improved by as much as 20% to 30% over conventional construction. Energy modeling can produce reports that graphically illustrate the efficiencies achieved through “invisible” building practices.
Many builders shy away from such techniques because of the perception that they cost more or because they don’t want to manage the learning curve that may be required for key subcontractors. But they may find themselves behind the curve. Many leading builders have shown that once subcontractors have been properly trained and high performance techniques become standard practice, the excuse dissolves. The result is a better-trained work force, subcontractors who are more engaged, and a better built home.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Similarly, you need to inspect what you expect. Some buyers would be surprised to know that the quality and performance of their newly constructed conventional home was never tested or reviewed. Leading builders are exploiting this fact by allowing their homes to be inspected and verified by third parties, with the results being made available to the buyer. Green certification and energy performance scoring are easy to understand, collective examples of these results. Savvy consumers will shop around to find the greatest value in their home purchase. Builders promoting green certification and energy scoring have an upper hand in providing consumers with real, in-depth information that allows them compare high performance homes to other homes on the market.
Defining a “good deal” and describing value has now become a more sophisticated proposition. Buyers are more educated than ever and the builders who are responding to this are finding success. New-age, savvy customers are learning the right questions to ask, and with PDAs and Smart phones can verify the answers in a matter of seconds. Because of this, realtors and brokers need to be armed with accurate and convincing sales tools to communicate the quality and efficiency of a home. Green certification and energy performance scores are the tools that builders and realtors need. It is also becoming more important than ever that realtors and brokers speak to, and understand, some of these construction details and attributes. Training programs such as Eco-Broker or Sustainability Training for Accredited Real Estate Professionals (STAR) provide realtors and brokers with the knowledge needed to address these issues with buyers.
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This phenomenon is not just a local trend in the Northwest, but is being realized by leading builders all over the country. The criteria for a Portland, Maine home may be very different than from a home in Phoenix, Arizona or from one in Portland, Oregon. However the priorities of the buyers potentially are very much the same: location, value, comfort, healthy, durable, and efficient. With an integrated approach to selling homes, green certification and energy efficiency are important pieces in the selling proposition.
So, what’s the energy performance of your home? If you don’t know; what else don’t you know about your home?
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