What if potential home buyers paid as much attention to the 'specs' on their home as they pay attention to the 'specs' on the potential car they are considering buying?
Of course, any car buff will tell you that styling matters. Yet that same car buyer will also tell you that features, safety, performance and feel are very important.
Now what if that car buyer goes to buy a house and cannot find anything remotely similar to the 'spec' sheet which s/he is familar with being from car buying experience?
Therein lies the dilemma. The residential housing market has been very slow to adopt forms of 'measurement' tools that would allow potential home buyers to guage the relative and absolute performance of one house versus another.
So, in the end who loses out? First and foremost, the potential home buyer because they are trying to compare apples to apples and end up with insufficient baseline data. The next group that loses out is the sellers. If the sellers of the residence(s) have not done a sufficient job in identifying and quantifying their superior attributes of their home(s), then why should a buyer pay more for their property? The next group to lose out are homebuilders and developers and general contractors who are constructing high performance homes. Much like a car manufacturer who installs a back-up camera with in-dash viewing screen for safety, so too, homebuilders are building homes with health and safety features that informed buyers would be quite interested in. Of course, the buyers have to know that these features exist.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools which are more recently increasing in awareness for buyers to make a more informed decision on which house to buy. From certifying organizations such as US Green Building Council with their LEED ratings, to the EPA's Energy Star program and RESNET's HERS rating, the intent is that homebuyers (and sellers for that matter) can honestly and realistically differentiate their home from competing homes on the basis of things that really matter: operating cost, health and safety.
Granted, this approach to homebuying has not 'taken over' the industry, but then again, people didn't used to care about MPG (miles per gallon) with their car either. In time, sentiment will most likely shift as awareness increases.
Michael Hobbs, SRA, LEED GA, PahRoo Appraisal & Consultancy
Twitter @Pahroo
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