‘Green’ Homes Could Find Niche
Will “green” homes perk up the punch-drunk U.S. housing market?
When there are more than 4-million unsold houses, builders and sellers cut prices or add value. Green homes that offer energy efficiency and power production follow the value path.
Yet properties that produce their own power and save energy will never make economic sense until they pay for themselves and are marketed as ways to lower ownership expenses and to build equity in declining markets.
Even though it’s a tiny part of the market, green homebuilding has risen 50 percent since 2004, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
More than 97,000 such homes have been built since the mid 1990s. The association says about 35,000 of them will be built this year out of a projected 1.5-million housing starts.
This niche will be significant if it grows at an annual rate of 5 to 10 percent by 2010, as the trade group predicts. New-home construction may not return to the 2006 level of more than 2-million units until 2011, it says.
Photo by MSDesign.
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