Building green has never been so popular.
From solar panels on rooftops to water heaters with remote control, many features that were once a rare find in real estate are now on their way to becoming the standard. At least, among luxury homebuyers.
“It’s been growing,” said Dave Caldwell, vice president of the Rhode Island Builders Association. “At the high-end level it’s … on the path to become the standard. We’re going to hit that point.”
Builders and architects have seen the increase in popularity of energy efficient features in recent years. There are many ways to make a house “greener,” from small design details to the home’s orientation.
Some of the most common green features include finding alternative sources of heat that don’t rely on gas or oil, such as air and water heat pumps or geothermal heating; installing solar panels to produce energy; and including water-saving landscape elements.
Remote control is also a big hit, with more buyers requesting wireless control over their systems. This allows them to turn them on and shut them off from anywhere.
But it goes beyond these features: the way the house is built can also contribute to making it more environmentally friendly and efficient, from the inclusion of good insulation all the way down to how you source and recycle the material used.
“We want to build a home for the future,” said Adam Titrington from Estes-Twombly + Titrington Architects Inc. in Newport, which designs homes throughout New England. “To get ahead of that, we encourage people to consider super-insulating the house. And I think people are really receptive when they hear the benefits, that you don’t get cold spots in your home, that your energy bills will be lower. It’s not a hard sell.”
Not a hard sell indeed. Mark Horan, owner of Horan Building Co. in Newport, sees it every day. The construction company builds homes ranging from $2 million to $10 million and most of these share similar features. High-efficiency equipment, in particular, is present in almost every single house he builds.
“What’s commonplace and what’s been the norm now is the equipment that’s really efficient, well-insulated homes,” Horan said. “That’s been getting progressively better over time to the point where now it’s the norm.”
A recent project in Newport is the perfect example of green luxury real estate: it features blown-in foam insulation, a high-efficiency furnace, and on-demand hot water heaters that owners can program to produce hot water at specific times.
Solar panels, often one of the features most easily associated with green building, are actually not as popular as some may think, Horan said, especially in some New England areas.
“We build on areas where there are a lot of historic homes and people don’t want to see solar panels on a Second Empire Victorian roof,” Horan said.
One of Titrington’s recent projects in Cape Cod is another great example of how a home’s features can be environmentally friendly. The client of the 5,000-square-foot house wanted a green and sustainable home, with a focus on the materials. Titrington’s team saw an opportunity to incorporate a material called hempcrete.
“By using this material as the insulation both in the walls and the roof, we were able to vastly reduce the carbon footprint of the house,” he said. “We really scrutinized all of the materials that went into the house to ensure that they’re healthy materials and environmentally responsible choices.”
Including green features in a home is not only good for the environment, but it can also often be a financially smart move in the long term for luxury homebuyers.
“They’re able to look at their house and say, ‘If I make the house net zero and pay for solar, I can lock in my utility costs over a 20-year horizon’ and avoid the variances that you’re seeing with the spikes in electricity this year,” Caldwell said. “That’s where the real money was made.”
Buyers can be hesitant sometimes, worried about higher costs of construction. But this has gradually become less of a problem as the price difference between traditional construction and ecofriendly construction narrows. Caldwell said the cost for a 3,000-square-foot house with an air source heat pump is approximately only 5% more than one with a traditional heating source. And that gap is closing.
“What I find is people want to do the right thing; they want to do their part for climate change, and they still want to have a really nice home,” Caldwell said.
The government has been trying to encourage buyers and builders to adapt energy-saving features through a series of eco-certificates. The most common are Energy Star, run by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Home program, but these are only two of the dozens of federally funded programs.
“It’s almost an overwhelming amount,” Titrington said. “I think that speaks to how urgent it is for designers and builders to adopt some of these better building methods.”
For luxury homebuyers, the cost has long stopped outweighing the benefits.
“The luxury buyer in general, the type of client that builds custom homes, is looking to keep the home. They want quality, they want something done right,” Caldwell said. “And they like to feel good about it; it gives them a chance to feel good about going green and trying to do their part to combat climate change.”
