Builders Tell How To Get A Jump On Green Residential Construction Trends

As Proud Green Home explains, most homebuyers don’t need a LEED-certified home. They just want a high-performance house with energy and water-efficient features.

The site spoke with a dozen leaders in the residential construction industry and identified the biggest trends in green building in 2017.

Gary Klein, president of Gary Klein & Associates, said that water heating is the next focus of the green building industry, and Martins Pecholcs of Covestro said that air-tight building envelopes will be key. Rob Howard of Mitsubishi Electric Cooling and Heating said that mini-split-system heat pumps will start to catch on in the U.S.

The experts also spoke about how green building can catch on in a big picture sense. Builders and manufacturers need to be bold and inventive, and they need to connect with consumers who are becoming more and more informed about high performance homes.

“The marketplace is changing; the consumers are not a uniform body of people,” says Claudette Reichel of LaHouse Resource Center. “The various age groups really have different values and different needs. But sustainability has been part of what the millennials have grown up with, so that is kind of a cultural shift, it's an expectation to not do too much damage to the planet and do their part. So being green may not be the number one motive in making a decision, it's one of the factors and it can be a deal breaker if you're too far to the other end.”

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