It’s So Easy Being “Green”
As Kermit the Frog is quoted “It’s NOT easy being green”, I want to take Kermit’s spin and pull it into a reversal. For the 17 years I have been building (thousands) of homes, I have had a passion for building safe, environmentally – conscious homes, when the word “green” was only a name of a color! I have an old brochure where I was passionately tyring to convince home buyers that they needed to be conscious of using materials that may cause mold in homes. It was like beating my head against a wall in trying to get the Milwaukee media to take these “green” issues seriously. Today, I doubt there are too many things that are being offered that I have not researched or built in this realm and I say to those of you who are serious about “green”, be CAREFUL, very careful.
Every builder today is trying to jump on board this green-painted bandwagon and many of them, to my way of thinking, are using green to their advantage. Their motivation seems honorable , but it is probably not to save the environment or NOT to save you energy dollars, even though it may seem so. Just like the snake-oil salesmen of the old West era, they are finding one key item that the public seems to care about, and are exploiting the public’s perceived need, into a greener (every green article is required to use the green=Green money pun at least once in each article, here-gos ) bank account for that builder.
No where did I see this dynamic taking place more than at the last (August 2009) Parade Of Homes. I had not seen this mis-use of information happen since the recent Waukesha “Trend House” was built and promoted as the next “big coming” of the future of green. In the advertising business, the mis-use or exaggerating of information is known as ‘puffery”. That is to say, that real facts are used and then blown up to huge , over-the-top proportions. The theory is that if the public has a worry about a certain ailment, the Doctor who has the best(or most ) ”cure(s)”, makes the most money. Those who are the sickest, (or “think” they are the sickest), will pay the most amount of money for the cure. And the smartest Doctors of these naive consumers, always has the most number of cures and pills to sell. In the interest of saving space and words, and at the potential cost of making my life a little tougher at the Metropolitan Builder’s Association meetings, I want to lay a few things on the table that you likely will not hear from most any other area Home Builder.
First, green is not all that we are making it out to be. Sure, it is important, but that being said , there are so many other building items that are much MORE important. let me say that most every builder in the area can , and does , have the ability to offer the exact same gadgets and gizmos as the most super “self-proclaimed” greenest builder. We all use pretty much the very same subcontractors to install these very same green items. I am talking about items like hi-tech insulation, windows, solar power, water heaters, Geo-thermal, recycling, non-off-gassing products, and the like . This blog today is NOT to tell you details about any one particular green item, (I will save those for future blogs) , it is to explain what, to my way of thinking, is the unsavory way some builder’s are using this legitimate concern of others to turn a quick, bigger dollar , or get folks to build with them rather than “take a chance” with another less green builder.
These builder’s are often the same builders who often have little else to offer, so they micro-focus on advertising “cleaner, safer, or healthier, homes. Check their record. Many of these builders have been in business less than 5 years. 5 years is the magic number for builders since most builders who are going to fail at this high risk trade, fail in the first 5 to 7 years. I found this out when I used to have a good number of interested home buyers choose not to use me in my first 5 years in business. I could not argue that they wanted to just make sure that their builder was going to be around for the long-haul. Sure, I had been around for years in the building industry , working for other’s, but that was not the same as actually being the boss of my own business. Knowing HOW to build and knowing HOW to operate a home building business were two very differnt things and not everyone was (or is) willing to chance their biggest investment to a good but short track record. But , this is a side-bar.
A few months ago, I attended yet another of the many annual Builder Association green seminars they hold to teach the builders how to be the best at the leading edge of green. I know what to look for and what sounds good to many but is not practical or really saves money. To me, one prime example is Solar power. Solar, , while it sounds good and is definitely green, no one has yet to be able to show me a formula that works. At the end of the seminar, there was a portion for audience questions. I did not want to cause a scene, so i came up to the speaker afterwards to pose my questions. He literally, had no answer to my querry. Another builder was listening on and was thinking the same question as to making the math work. It did not.
At the Parade Of Homes (2009) we had an “all-green” Parade. We all were Energy Star and Green certified for every home. As my headline on this article says, IT’S SO EASY TO BE GREEN“. We did not have to go far to get our certifications. One big news item for the Parade was the two homes that had some form of solar power. One used the solar to heat the water and one had a whole roof and solar tracker (a unit that looks like some Army field Radar screen that is computerized to track(follow) the sun to capture the maximum power of the sun. ) I deeply respect the builder of this home and what they were trying to do to try to make solar just one step closer to being cost effective and to becoming a real part of our lives in the future. They had a difficult time getting the home to appraise out because the appraisers will only put a small fraction of added value to their numbers for solar. There is however a HUGE differnce in this statement of praise to the builder, and in actually believing that having solar power today is an idea that it’s time has come. It has not. Even the builder’s own handout at the Parade showed that unless you calculated the gas savings of using an electric car into the energy usage of the home (really, imagine including your gas costs into your home operation cost . Does this make sense to anyone?) AND, unless you used a figure to calculate how much energy costs would go up each year (hey did anyone notice that natural gas came DOWN last year?), The figures just do not work . At least they do not work TODAY, the solar panel suppliers will even tell you this much, but not the builders. The problem with solar is that when the cost equation eventually does work, the tens of thousands it will now cost to put an electronic football field on your roof, will make todays technology in solar panels absolutely obsolete!
Ask Yourself This.
Would you really want to be the guy who thought those Sony 42 inch flat panel televisions were so neat that they were worth the $10,000 that Flanner’s, or American had posted on their 2003 display models? The era of those flat panels were not really here just yet. Today, those televisions are bigger, much better, thinner, and cost WAY less. I doubt you could get close to $1,000 for that $10,000 television on Craig’s list. Anyone want to buy an 7 year old television for 10 tiimes as much? Anyone who is looking at solar power today is truly looking at the very same dynamic . I am here to tell you that putting this technology on a 30 year mortgage is verging on foolish. As for myself, even if someone were were to literally “give” you solar power with a home, in 4 or 5 or 7 years when you go to sell that home, that roof- full of unsightly techno-panels will be about as attractive to re-sale as having a front projection three-tube tlevison , Beta video recorder, or cassette recorder. The technology in solar panels is advancing so fast that , just like those flat panel , better, bigger, cheaper flat televisions of today, the time WILL be right to go solar. Just not today, or probably not tomorrow either.
As for another recent real- life example, listen to this. I have a solar panel house located right next door to a spec home we are building in Milwaukee. This home has a big sign in the front yard saying “solar powered“. It is just under 2,200 square feet in size. It has been for sale for many months before we even broke ground on our smaller 2024 square foot home , located immediately next door . My home has a 3 car garage, theirs has only a 2 car garage. Both have 4 bedrooms but theirs has a nice big upstairs loft that mine does not. My home was priced at $269,000. Their’s was over $275,000(as I recall) ,when it was first listed(remember, before we broke ground). After we broke ground, it had been reduced to $249,000. It has been at this low price for several months. Ours sold a few weeks ago (we were still in the drywall stage) for close to our asking price, and we had several interested parties at the time. Each had said of the neighboring solar home, they were scarred of the technology being “dated” by the time they would sell this home. I did have a few shoppers who thought this might be a good idea but would rather it had nicer cabinets or counter tops instead of the solar technology.
The bigger point is that when the market finally does see solar makes mathematical and re-sale sense, solar power will already be mainstream. For those who wish to be on the front edge of this technology, our heating/cooling vendor are the same folks who did that neighboring home, and the Parade solar models as well. The little secret is that even those who provide and install the productsto the builders have whispered that the technology, if strictly on a pay-back basis, is not the reason to use solar powered water heating or whole-house solar. For those who want to do good for the World’s resources , we will gladly install them, and give them our thanks. The difference is that you should be buying solar or any green product knowing the whole story and not just the wishful ones.
Judging by my word count, I have now posted my longest blog yet. I have so much more to say on the subject of being sold green for the sake of green. I told you in my ending to my last blog that I would do a story on a “wild idea” for the master bedroom. I will try to breifly wrap this up and start that segment in my next blog. My apologies for going all green on you. I will summarize what I do feel are the real green items to look for next time we meet.
Thanks to those who came to visit me yesterday at our “secret blogger’s” day at my Milwaukee model. We will have to do that again some time soon. I had fun, and hopefully, so did you.
Blessings,
Tom Hignite
