Get Blog Updates on your iGoogle homepage:
| Builders Starting to Recognize Importance of Energy Efficiency |
| Written by Jonathan Smoke | |
| 04.18.2008 | |
|
Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts) Patrick Duffy’s HousingChronicles blog featured a post yesterday about Beazer Homes and their new branded green building program. As I wrote last week, energy efficiency is a hot topic for consumers based on the data from the 2007-2008 NAHB Consumer Preference Study. One question in the survey puts an exclamation point on why builders need to be focusing on such programs and making all new homes as energy efficient as possible. In the section of the survey where respondents were asked to just choose between two contrasting alternatives, the typical aggregated data—as highlighted on the chart below—reveal split opinions. As you can clearly see, when asked to choose between “a highly energy efficient home that resulted in lower utility bills over the lifetime of the home and used less energy” and “a home without energy efficient features that cost 2-3% less,” consumers overwhelmingly chose the highly energy efficient home. No other tradeoff had such a stark contrast. Furthermore, our Consumer Groups showed that the weakest affinity for the highly energy efficient home was 82%. Several Consumer Groups expressed a 95% preference for highly energy efficient homes. Builders who use this down market to take the time to understand home buyers and listen to what consumers want will no doubt perform better in terms of sales pace and margins achieved. But unlike Beazer, builders and researchers need not do their own surveys to discover what consumers want—we’ve got clear insights available in our reports on HousingIntelligence and through our sister company RatingInsights. 
We're always looking for feedback from our readers.
|
))
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
