So, one of my clients sent me an article about how the market is making the adjustment to greener homes. Her email was a response to my article a few days ago about Seattle potentially making energy audits a requirement on resale (not new) homes in the city. She was pretty ticked off that this might become a requirement and thought that the free market should decide what would happen to updates on energy efficiency.
While I agreed with her that a free market for this would be nice, it won’t help us meet certain timelines for initiatives in reducing carbon emissions. This article that she supplied mostly comes at this from a new construction home standpoint and new construction is already waaaaayyy better than the older housing stock in terms of energy efficiency – especially in regulation happy Seattle. We have some of the most strict standards in the USA from what members of the local Master Builder’s Association and the commercial building sector tell me and other areas usually lag behind us so much that our minimum requirements help many buildings here meet energy standards that are extras in other parts of the country.
The article does mention that some companies are seeing opportunities to go into older building stock to do retrofits but it isn’t an issue unless a homeowner decides they want to cut their utility bills. I will agree with another notation in the article about consumers not asking about the utility usage of homes for many years. Only in the past 12-14 months have I ever been asked what the utilities look like on a home that a buyer is considering purchasing.
