An Architect's Tips on Selling Energy Savings

In a blog post last month, we posed the question: do consumers want energy efficiency upgrade options? Since then, we’ve received feedback from high performance building advocates, builders and architects – one in particular who offered guidance on selling energy efficient home options to today’s...

Transparency is a growing macro-trend across numerous markets. Increasingly, today’s consumers, especially millennials, want to know exactly what goes into the clothes they wear, the food they eat and the homes they buy. For homes, one of the top things today’s buyer wants to know about is energy use. Fortunately for buyers, energy use...

The popularity of HERS-rated homes is clear, with 38 percent of all new homes getting HERS rated in 2015[1]. This figure is indicative of the importance of this energy performance marker to both builders and homebuyers and the growth trend is likely to continue. As builder adoption of the HERS score expands, how can HERS raters help builders make...

Are builders missing the mark by not offering upgrade options for HERS-Scored homes?

Homebuyers like choices. Builders, ever eager to meet the desires of their buyers, typically offer a dizzying array of choices in products, finishes and designs to suit a wide variety of styles. Yet seemingly few builders offer consumers a choice in homes at...

If you’re a home builder, you may already know that nine out of 10 home buyers today rely on the Internet as one of their primary research sources and 52 percent turn to the web as their first step in the home search, according “The Digital House Hunt” published by National Association of Realtors® Moreover, in the digital age, consumers use...

Providence Homes has built more than 1,000 certified Energy Star homes – getting RESNET Grade One, a requirement of Energy Star Home Certification, using fiber glass batt insulation in each home. How does Providence do it, again and again when others say it’s difficult to achieve? One word: training.

While solar homes have reached a milestone, superior envelope efficiency must be primary

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced that the number of U.S. homes with solar panels has reached 1 million. As the primary on-site renewable power generation source, the expansion of rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) means a much more distributed...

Research shows that consumers want energy efficiency, but they’re motivated by comfort. As builders pursue energy efficient homes, they may need to shift how they promote the benefits of high performance homes to potential buyers, so that their messages resonate on an emotional level in an area that consumers really care about: comfort.

Comfort callbacks are both timely and cost consuming, so here’s what you can do to reduce them.

The single largest financial investment that consumers will make in their lifetime is their home and a wealth of research finds that homeowners want their abodes to be energy efficient and comfortable. Both comfort and energy efficiency rely heavily on...

With a goal of reducing energy use while increasing efficiency and cutting carbon emissions, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in June proposed the first new energy efficiency standards update for manufactured homes in more than 20 years. The changes would cumulatively cut energy use by an estimated 30 percent over a 30 year period compared to...