Ultimate Open House

Energy efficiency, utility costs and environmental impact are important factors to consider when buying or building a new home, but they’re not always easy to quantify.  Energy Performance Score is changing all that.

EPS, developed by Energy Trust of Oregon, provides a clear and quantitative way to compare a home’s energy use to similar-sized homes in Oregon. The lower the score, the more efficient the home—and the lower your estimated utility costs.

Why is knowing home energy use important?

Purchasing a new home is an investment, and with any investment it’s important to make sure you’re getting the most value for your dollar. Just like a car,  a home incurs operation costs. Energy use is one of the largest operating costs to homeowners. If you build or purchase a home with a low EPS, that means you’re able to use less energy to complete everyday functions like heating and cooling rooms and running appliances.

Choosing an energy-efficient home not only benefits the environment but can also help you save money. In fact, the monthly energy savings you receive may even exceed the additional mortgage costs of those energy-efficient improvements.

Ask your builder about EPS, or visit www.energytrust.org/eps for more information on why it is the best way to compare homes based on annual energy use and environmental impact.

The Home Builders Association supports green living and a healthy lifesyle. Anyone who rides their bike to visit a UOH home may enter themselves into a drawing to recieve a 1975 era Fuji Dynamic 10 Road bike complete with Fujita leather saddle, Suntour components and downtube shifters or a Timbuktu Messenger bag courtesy of Clean It Up Mark.

Enter by riding to any home on the Tour, looking for the red enter to win bag and droping your name into the bag or take a picture of you and your bike in front of a Tour Home, then e mail to mark@cleanitupmark.com.

Learn more at www.uoh2011cycling.com.

Americans favor walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, with 56% of respondents preferring smart growth neighborhoods over neighborhoods that require more driving between home, work and recreation. That’s according to a recent study, the Community Preference Survey, by the National Association of REALTORS®.

“REALTORS® care about improving communities through smart growth initiatives,” said NAR President Ron Phipps, broker-president of Phipps Realty in Warwick, R.I. “Our members don’t just sell homes, they sell neighborhoods. REALTORS® understand that different home buyers are looking for all kinds of neighborhood settings and that many home buyers want walkable, transit-accessible communities.”

Walkable communities are defined as those where shops, restaurants and local businesses are within walking distance from homes.

According to the survey, when considering a home purchase, 77% of respondents said they would look for neighborhoods with abundant sidewalks and other pedestrian-friendly features, and 50% would like to see improvements to existing public transportation rather than initiatives to build new roads and developments.

The survey also revealed that while space is important to home buyers, many are willing to sacrifice square footage for less driving. Eighty percent of those surveyed would prefer to live in a single-family, detached home as long as it didn’t require a longer commute, but nearly three out of five of those surveyed—59%—would choose a smaller home if it meant a commute time of 20 minutes or less.

The survey also found that community characteristics are very important to most people. When considering a home purchase, 88% of respondents placed more value on the quality of the neighborhood than the size of the home, and 77% of those surveyed want communities with high-quality schools.

Portland was (aptly) named “Best Place to Ditch Your Car” in the West by Sunset Magazine.  Read what they had to say below.

About four months ago, the New Seasons natural-foods chain made a quintessentially Portland move: It dedicated more parking to bikes than cars at its newest store. “There’s this subculture of people in their 20s and 30s who don’t even think about owning cars,” says Michael Andersen, who last year parted with his ’99 Toyota and used the proceeds to fund a startup newsmagazine, Portland Afoot, that covers “low-car living” in the City of Roses.

Bikes aside, Portland excels at alternative options. The TriMet buses link seamlessly with 52 miles of light rail and the nation’s first new streetcar line in a half-century. But Portland’s commitment to cycling is mind boggling, with upward of 300 miles of bike lanes, bike paths, and specially marked “bike boulevards,” where car volume is kept low. There are countless bike shops, bike clubs, bike races, bike blogs, and bike nonprofits, not to mention bike-thru coffee shops and bike-polo matches. One local credit union even offers bicycle loans.

From Daily Journal of Commerce

Using recycled carpeting or a highly insulated building envelope for a home may lead to reduced greenhouse gas emissions, but a greater impact can be made by simply constructing a smaller home, according to a study released last week by Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality.

While there is some demand for smaller homes from empty nesters, couples and single people, Jim Chapman, vice president of Legend Homes, said others will need to be convinced of the advantages to living in houses smaller than 1,200 square feet.

The largest barrier to popularizing small homes is cost, Chapman said. Homes are priced per square foot, and the most expensive rooms in a house are the bathroom and kitchen. Even if a home has less square footage, the land it sits on isn’t cheaper and the kitchen and bathroom expenses drive up the cost per square foot, Chapman said.

“I’m hoping all of us downsize over time,” Chapman said. “But right now it’s hard to find people even in a position to buy a home. And people in a position to buy a home don’t tend to look at energy efficiency as much as they should. Some people will spend more for a smaller house, but the smaller it is, the more it costs.”

The results of the DEQ study are being presented to state agencies, cities and counties to help inform future policy makers about greenhouse gases, Palmeri said.

Read full article here…