The green real estate market is the way to go, but what is holding it back?
The green real estate projects are rising fast, but developers would like to see them rise faster. While environmentally friendly technologies are rapidly advancing, there is one aspect which still has not fully kept pace with the emergence of green housing on the property market the issue of appraisals. Take a home that would normally cost half a million dollars to assemble. In addition, you choose to invest into high-quality insulation, solar panels, and ask your architect to design the home to take advantage of sunshine to its fullest potential. Due to these green alternatives, this will add an extra $100,000 to the cost of the property.
Still, your bank’s appraiser values it another way. David Snook is an appraiser and representative of the real property committee on education for the American Society of Appraisers and he does doesn’t think it’s about the build price of the real estate but more about resale value.
Now we have sorted that, let’s look in more detail into our example. Although the property cost $600,000 to build the bank or mortgage company will only approve the value at $550,000. With a 20% down payment, you will have to save $160,000 rather than of $110,000. In place of of having $27,500 to pay you would have $77,500, if you were trying for a high-ratio mortgage, as these require a 5% down payment. That is a large increase in particular if you are on a budget and every bit of savings matters. So with such a big down payment you have to assess your priorities and these could be forgetting about going green, or only having cheaper and probably inferior technology.
Nevertheless, as a green Toronto listings expert I realize green properties do make a big difference whatever the cost. If you look at the Green Work Realty statement, you will see why green houses are better financially, with their increased resale value of more than 8% and the fact they sell 22% faster. Sadly, when you deal with an appraiser having little or no experience with green real estate technologies (and that’s quite likely, especially if you are among the green pioneers in your area), your home’s value will most probably be underestimated.
There is hardly anything that can be done about it at the moment . Nevertheless, I think there will be strong initiatives soon to standardize indicators of environmental and energetic efficiency, which will definitely help appraisers (and future owners) to move forward. Green property is about money as well as the all important environment. Take buying a car – would you buy a vehicle without finding out about how fuel efficient it is? Therefore it is only common progression when using the same analogy when buying a house.
