Over the last few days I've blogged on our eXp Realty Corporate site on the subject of Bricks and Mortar.  The first Article is "The Relevance and Future Demise of Bricks and Mortar" and the second one is "eXp Realty and Being a Green Real Estate Firm".

I blogged the second on based on some ideas presented by Terry Watson at a great presentation I saw down in Everett yesterday and he talked about putting information about being Green and talk about Carbon Footprint.

I thought a bit about it and thought maybe I would talk about the difference in Carbon Footprint between an agent who works out of their home (like in our model) vs someone who works out of a typical Bricks and mortar office.

There was also a bit of talk about a Green designation and the like, however I digress.

I wrote the article and it turns out that when you factor in commute, heat, air conditioning etc...  The additional Carbon Footprint cost of driving to and from an office 5 days a week is 5.652 tons of additional CO2 emissions per year.  This was actually light because I was factoring in a commute to the office of 5 miles each way and the national average commute is 12.5 miles each way.

I did think, Okay, 5.652 tons is a pretty big deal, but how much of a big deal is it.

The first thing you have to determine is where is most of that Carbon Footprint coming from.  Well it turns out that most of it is coming from driving.  Something like 90% of it comes from driving.  The rest comes from the 100 square feet on average that an agent takes up.  If you figure out that other people have to show up as well to the office, the cost per agent goes up again but I digress once again.

Now I thought, how does that compare with a home office.  In most cases most of the costs associated with a home office are already paid for by reason that there is already a home.  The cost of heating the home office is rather negligible and it turns out that running a computer an extra 8 hours a day only adds about 44 lbs of CO2 per year to your footprint.  Even printing is a very minor addition of less then 100 lbs / year of CO2 output with something like 5000 pages a year being printed.

The difference in Carbon Output of a Home and a Home where a Home Office is present goes from something like 2800 lbs of CO2 per year to a whopping 3000 lbs of CO2 output and we if we use energy smart light bulbs, recycle everything we can we will reduce our CO2 output by something like 500 lbs per year.

Compare that to the over 10,000 lbs of CO2 increased by going to an office every day you can see how anyone who is serious about the environment can make an immediate major impact on their Carbon Footprint by working out of their home as much as possible.

The Crazy Talk is when you compare the 200 lbs of additional CO2 output by working out of your home office vs the 10,000+ lbs (5.652 tons) of CO2 output created when you commute to work on a daily basis going to the office doesn't look like a very Green Option.  In fact you could almost say that working out of a Bricks and Mortar office in the face of the alternative of working out of ones home office is downright wasteful.

Think about what is 200 lbs of addition CO2 Output / 10,000 lbs of CO2 Output for going to a Bricks and Mortar office.  We are talking 2% of the CO2 Output of going to a Physical Office or by going to a Bricks and Mortar Office you are increasing your Office CO2 Output by 5000% or 50x your Home Office Output.

Think about the looks we give someone for now recycling their newspaper.  They could recycle their newspaper till they are blue in the face and they wouldn't even approach the impact of working from one's home office even one day a week and yet we don't typically don't look at our neighbor and go, what the hell are you doing driving to work, don't you know that increases your Carbon Output.