Recently I had the chance to meet Ben Kaufman owner of GreenWorks Realty for an interview. Below is a paraphrased synopsis of the interview. Let us know what your thoughts are and if you have any feedback on the interview.
Why did you focus your environmental passion on realty?
The lowest hanging fruit…the easiest thing that we can do…the biggest bang for the buck and the most effective/efficient thing that we can do is conservation, not going to get more but conserving what we have. That’s the easiest thing to do right now and the biggest bang for the investment dollar. So the largest piece, the largest section of that market is how we live… how we all live in our home.
Personally I live in a 1920’s bungalow a couple blocks from here (we filmed at his office in Seattle) with a brick exterior, single pane windows, couple inches of rock wall insulation in the attic and no air sealing. It was almost like living on a porch sometimes. We had pretty high energy bills for gas, and electricity. So we did a blower door test on our home and it was like we had a 3X3 foot hole in the side of our house. That’s how much we had to turn up the fan on the blower door test to create the pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the house.
That’s a lot of air that we’re just…“poof” …heating the outside. What we did was identified this, air sealed first and we put 16 inches of blown cellulous. We went from a R5 in our attic to a R48.
If everyone was doing that, its massive savings across the country, the scale is huge. That’s the biggest bang for the buck in America these days.
How are you trying to make an impact through your company?
Ben - One of the things that we’ve been spending a lot of time on at the company has been to implement a label, an energy label for the home. Where that label helps consumers identify the score like a MPG sticker for a car. We (consumes) have labels and we’re use to that, it’s incredibly valuable for consumers out shopping for a car. You know the first thing I do when I’m out there looking for cars is I want to know what the fuel consumption is.
Well, we have no clue what our consumption is for our homes. We really don’t take the time to compare…we don’t have any measure. It’s just a vacuum of information. So what I think is really valuable and what I would love to see out on the market place and what we’re hoping to push in the market place is an energy score. There are several of them out there, most of them are terrific. So let’s get a label/sticker and lets help consumers have that label for homes that scores the home 1 – 100 on how it is performing energy wise. Also include information on what are the easy fixes to improve that score.
How can Hohm Help in your industry?
buyers haven’t really…well they show up at a green building and they look around and it looks well designed, it looks pretty interesting, but you know they’re looking at the building and say they can read the boards with the green elements but how does the person interested to buy green understand the features and why it is beneficial to them personally. Why is it healthier for them? Why does it save them money? How does it save them money and what kind of money are they going to save? Getting a little more granular on the benefits of green is another trend that is happening right now….I think we’re looking at another 20year cycle of green homes becoming more and more important to the American home buyer.