To start with, I am honored to be the recipient of this green building award from the National Home Builders Association. It is very encouraging and rewarding for my company to be nationally recognized for something that we started working on 4 years ago. This is when the journey began…
It was July 2007, when a friend of mine and I started talking about this unavoidable green trend. Anywhere we looked, whether it was print media, television, internet or radio you would always see companies trying to be more environmentally friendly and responsible with the products and services they provided. However, we did not see, at least in our local level, a strong presence of this green minded approach for the homes and communities that we leave in. A quick web searched led us to discover that there was the Earthcraft House and Energy Star program. LEED seem to be on a pilot program for homes, and there was not much out there that looked at the homes as part of a larger system. In other words we were looking for a holistic approach to developing a neighborhood/community.
With my strong real estate and construction background, and my friend’s expertise in market research and product development experience, we decided to find out what the average people thought about sustainable living, which by itself is very abstract. So, for a period of six month we developed very detailand thorough survey documents that we later used to conducted street surveys at the doors of local farmer’s market, and mail surveys to owners of hybrid cars. The preliminary results were very encouraging and very quickly found out that there was a huge opportunity.
To validate our findings, we decided to conduct a focus group. For this event we invited 8 people from the surveyed sample, and prepared a presentation following a specific methodology for finding out what people really want. If I am not mistaken the name of the technique we used is called SIMALTA, and it basically forces people to make decisions based on limited resources. Isn’t it this how we make our everyday purchasing decisions? In other words, you make trade off. If you had unlimited resources you would want everything on a car for example. You would want the ABS break, roof top, leather seats, etc. However, if you have limit resources, you have to really think on what features you want, and how much you are willing to pay for them. This is precisely what we did but in our case we wanted to analyze the features or attributes of these “green” homes by itself, the community, and the interaction between them. For . It is very encouraging and rewarding for my company to be nationally recognized for something that we started working on 4 years ago. This is when the journey began…
It was July 2007, when a friend of mine and I started talking about this unavoidable green trend. Anywhere we looked, whether it was print media, television, internet or radio you would always see companies trying to be more environmentally friendly and responsible with the products and services they provided. However, we did not see, at least in our local level, a strong presence of this green minded approach for the homes and communities that we leave in. A quick web searched led us to discover that there was the Earthcraft House and Energy Star program. LEED seem to be on a pilot program for homes, and there was not much out there that looked at the homes as part of a larger system. In other words we were looking for a holistic approach to developing a neighborhood/community.
With my strong real estate and construction background, and my friend’s expertise in market research and product development experience, we decided to find out what the average people thought about sustainable living, which by itself is very abstract. So, for a period of six month we developed very detailand thorough survey documents that we later used to conducted street surveys at the doors of local farmer’s market, and mail surveys to owners of hybrid cars. The preliminary results were very encouraging and very quickly found out that there was a huge opportunity.
To validate our findings, we decided to conduct a focus group. For this event we invited 8 people from the surveyed sample, and prepared a presentation following a specific methodology for finding out what people really want. If I am not mistaken the name of the technique we used is called SIMALTA, and it basically forces people to make decisions based on limited resources. Isn’t it this how we make our everyday purchasing decisions? In other words, you make trade off. If you had unlimited resources you would want everything on a car for example. You would want the ABS break, roof top, leather seats, etc. However, if you have limit resources, you have to really think on what features you want, and how much you are willing to pay for them. This is precisely what we did but in our case we wanted to analyze the features or attributes of these “green” homes by itself, the community, and the interaction between them. For us it was very important to be able to gauge this interaction since one of our premises was to determine if people only cared about a home, or did they prefer a community/neighborhood of which the homes where just a component of a larger system. In other words, we were trying to find out if a holistic approach to building green communities made sense. The conclusions were astonishing…
So right when we were ready to start looking for the ideal property to develop following a holistic design approach, where we would build a one of a kind neighborhood, the bottom fell off in the housing industry. This led us to put our vision in the back burner, and wait for the economy to improve before committing ona project like this. During this time, both EarthCraft and LEED developed their community designed guidelines which served as an additional way to validate our conclusions, since many of the requirements or points to comply with these programs were the things that we discovered in our focus group.
During this period, I decided to get ready for when the market started showing signs of improvements, so I learned as much as possible about sustainable and energy efficiency construction. I accomplished this by becoming a certified HERS rater, a building analyst with the Building Performance Institute, an EarthCraft technical advisor, and a licensed general contractor.
It was July of 2010 when I saw the opportunity to acquire 4 lots in a fairly stable community in Athens, GA, and decided to test drive the “home components” of our focus group conclusions. This home that won the award and its twin, were designed and built to capture most of the features and attributes of our findings. I enjoyed every single minute of the planning and construction process of these two homes, and using them as much as I could as educational tools by making them available for seminars and open house events, while in construction, to the citizens, county agencies, and trade organizations. So, part 1 of my vision has been officially completed…
Now I am looking forward on an opportunity to fulfill the part 2 of my vision, and develop from the ground up a community that will provided all the sustainability components gathered in my market research and make them available in an affordable and simple way to the average person.
This way of construction it’s not just for the green minded people, it ought to be the standard in construction because it not only makes sense for the environment but also to our pockets. It has been proven that these homes save you money in perpetuity.
