Boston Home Improvement Blog

Housing Trends: Small (and green) is in

We're just starting to look for a home to buy after moving to metroWest from western MA, selling our home out there, and renting for a spell here. Home shopping has been fascinating. Our favorite tool is Trulia; we have a specific part of a certain town where we want to live, and being able to visually look at homes for sale on a map is a feature that frankly should have been available long ago.

We are pretty standard, middle class folks, so we're not looking at 7-figure homes, but we're not looking at burned out shacks, either. What we are interested in is a smaller (1500 square feet would be ideal) home. Finding a smaller home in good shape AND in our desired area is turning out to be a bit harder than we'd originally planned. The homes all tend to be too large for our taste.

Many newer homes are 2000 square feet or larger. Having lived in a 2100 square foot home with an 800 sf attic and 800 sf basement years ago, we know that heating bills are a killer. We know that we use about 1000 square feet comfortably, and tend to congregate in the family room; 1500 square feet works well for us, and is much more affordable to heat.

We're noticing many 2500 square foot homes on the market, at prices that are far more reasonable than we'd have otherwise expected. Our real estate agent says that she's hearing the same thing repeatedly from buyers: I don't want to have to pay to heat a huge home.

We also want to have an energy-efficient home. If you have $2.8 million, you can even have a nearly carbon-neutral home:

For the high-profile crowd that turned out to celebrate a new home in Venice, Calif., the attraction wasn’t just the company and the architectural detail. The house boasted the builders’ equivalent of a three-star Michelin rating: a LEED platinum certificate.

The actors John Cusack and Pierce Brosnan, with his wife, Keely Shaye Smith, a journalist, came last fall to see a house that the builders promised would “emit no harmful gases into the atmosphere,” “produce its own energy” and incorporate recycled materials, from concrete to countertops.

Behind the scenes were Tom Schey, a homebuilder in Santa Monica, and his business partner, Kelly Meyer, an environmentalist whose husband, Ron, is the president of Universal Studios. Ms. Meyer said their goal was to show that something energy-conscious “doesn’t have to look as if you got it off the bottom shelf of a health-food store.”

“It doesn’t have to smell like hemp,” she said.

That was probably a good thing. The four-bedroom house was for sale, with a $2.8 million asking price.

Its rating was built into that price. LEED — an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the hot designer label, and platinum is the badge of honor — the top classification given by the U.S. Green Building Council. “There’s kind of a green pride, like driving a Prius,” said Brenden McEneaney, a green building adviser to the city of Santa Monica, adding, “It’s spreading all over the place.”

Whenever we find our "dream house" or at least our "not a nightmare house," we plan to find a LEED-certified architect to work on making our home more energy efficient. In western Mass we had geothermal heat and air conditioning; $100-150 per month electric bills (everything in the home except cooking gas) spoiled us. Ideally, we'd like to install such a system in an existing home, although the price tag--$15,000 to $20,000--is daunting. The return on investment is around 10-12 years though, and as energy costs increase, the ROI gets even better.

As you might imagine, LEED-certified professionals are in high demand. If you're considering a new home that involves a LEED professional, or a renovation that involves one, start contacting them now and getting estimates long before any projects are scheduled to begin.

Posted by Melanie Zoltan
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