Green Houses, The New Real Estate Renaissance?

Green homes!  Okay, okay, maybe you don’t see it clearly right now but you gotta take your thoughts off your gas-guzzling truck or SUV for a moment and see if you can get the correct answer to this question.  Okay, true or false, the average U.S. home causes twice as much greenhouse emissions as a single car.  The answer is True.  No this does not qualify you for are you smarter than a 5th grader! 

According to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency, a typical house requires power for heating, air conditioning, hot water and lighting.  that’s enough to cause the emission of three tons of polluting carbon gases each year compared with about 1.5 tons for the typical car on the road. 

Well while you are working on fine-tuning that sales pitch for the next environmental renaissance, let me inform you that by 2010 half of the new homes built in the good ole US will be classified as “green” homes!  Okay so now you want to know who gets to classify the house as green, right!  There are several national groups and a growing number of locals that no doubt will be battling for years over the standards for a green house.

Perhaps the best-known group in green building is the U.S. Green Building Council, or USGBC, a nonprofit group that developed its own point rating system for green commercial projects and has certified 800 projects as green since 2000 through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, or LEED. The organization uses consultants under contract to certify projects according to USGBC rules.

The second group working on standards is the National Association of Home Builders, a trade group with 235,000 corporate members This group, which worked a decade ago to develop a standard way to measure square footage in homes, began work on green building rules in 2004. The process has been a long and arduous one, incorporating input from not only builders but architects, interior designers and construction product manufacturers. The rules being developed in collaboration with the International Code Council, will be written for accreditation from the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI.

Still confused, I’m with you!  However, it appears that in this stagnant economy there is an appeal for green homes.  Yes, it is the right thing to do-but it still seems to be a fast growing market of potential buyers which has the building industry’s as well as Realtors attention.  Right now there is no reliable way breaking down sales of green versus conventional homes. But a number of trends provide insight into green building’s great promise.  More than 97,000 homes have been built and certified by voluntary green building programs around the country since the mid-1990s, according to the National Association of Home Builders, representing a 50 percent increase from the group’s 2004 survey.

However, if you aren’t ready to invest in the next real estate wave, there are some things that you can do to your current home to make it more energy efficient.  Look for those tips in future blogs.