Making Sense of Green Home Certifications

By Erik Fowler, Green trends expert

This is the fourth article in a series designed to help you make sense of the green landscape as a real estate professional. REALTOR® Magazine’s Styled, Staged & Sold blog and I are excited to be covering green home trends in America. In the previous article, I provided a quick guide to green home trends. Here, we’ll highlight green home ratings and certifications.

As we discussed in the last few articles, when discussing green homes it’s important to avoid generalizations or greenwashing, and stick to specifics. As real estate professionals, we should always insist on third-party sources of reliable and verifiable information wherever possible.

When people make “green” claims, we need to know exactly what they mean.

Below are the most widely recognized national green building and/or energy efficient programs nationwide. Keep in mind there are local and regional green building programs as well.

For instance, the Austin Green Building Program was not only one of the first programs in the country to develop a regional green building standard, but it is still considered to be one of the very best programs and models.

Commonalities Among Green Programs

All green building programs should ideally share some common attributes, namely:

• Third-party verification;
• Performance (points) and/or a prescriptive path designed to set green “targets” in several green categories;
• Documentation;
• A resource center for the builder and the consumer.

The point to note is that a standard is followed, documented, measured, and verified. We all know what happens when standards are “self enforced” with no accountability (think latest mortgage crisis).

Also, notice below the various categories of green, what each certification addresses, and recall that green homes do more than address just energy use. While very important, energy is not the only measure of green or sustainability in a home or building.

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A Quick Guide to Green Trends

By Erik Fowler

Over the next several months, REALTOR® Magazine’s Styled, Staged & Sold blog and I are excited to be covering green home trends. Check back with us, as this is one in a series of articles to help you make sense of the green landscape as a real estate professional.

Many of you may even consider the new NAR GREEN designation, the only sustainable property designation recognized by the National Association of Realtors®. Topics we will cover over the next few months are:

1) The Big Picture – Defining “Green”
2) Green Homes and Real Estate
3) Who are Green Buyers and Sellers?
4) Listing and Selling Green – Important Issues to Consider
5) Green Certifications  – Making Sense of Rating Systems
6) Greening your Real Estate Practice

THE BIG PICTURE

Did you know? According to several studies including the U.S. Department of Energy, homes and buildings account for 40-50 percent of total U.S. energy consumption and at least 20-40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.

In addition, construction of homes and other buildings use more than 30 percent of all raw materials and produce at least 30 percent of waste generation in the U.S. each year. Wow!

Committed followers of green subscribe to sustainable growth principles which reject “false choices” of economic growth versus environmental stewardship and social responsibility. Proponents believe these goals can and should occur simultaneously.

The study and goal of sustainable growth is a topic which I encourage you to research. As it Read more