NAHB recently released the results of their monthly Housing Market Index survey which included a set of special questions. The data revealed top builder pain points in 2016, and how builders expect these pain points to change in 2017. The top problem continues to be cost and availability of labor, which builders see increasing in 2017....

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...

Back in December we wrote about a change in the 2018 IECC that laid out a new, prescriptive path for the use of buried ducts in standard vented attics. This practice offers the potential to save significant energy over typical vented attic designs, and can even rival the savings of an unvented attic done with ccSPF under the roof deck, at much...

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...

When a new version of the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) is completed there can be a good deal of lag time between publication and market impact. This is because states need to adopt the new code, a process which is measured in years, not weeks or months. However, there can be exceptions to this general rule. The 2018 IECC laid out...

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.

Vented attics have a number of benefits, but also one well known and pesky downside: it is very hard to perfectly air seal the ceiling plane given the number of penetrations you have. This results in energy losses but also, often times, pulling less hygienic air from the attic into the home itself. LG Squared, a firm out of Atlanta offering...