Last week, Rich and Steve were in studio with Leslie Kellogg, an Energy Smart Real Estate Specialist, and  Chris Aguir from RISE Engineering. RISE has been helping Rhode Islanders reduce energy usage for three decades and Leslie and Chris gave some really good tips for people to save money on their energy bills, add value to their house, and to use these improvements to distinguish those properties  when they are on the market.

National Grid offers a program where they will send out a Rise engineer to give an energy audit. Homeowners are often reluctant to receive an energy audit because they think it will be some long, expensive process. This is not true, an energy audit involves a whole house approach in assessing the performance of a building with regard to energy consumption and efficiency   For info and to schedule appointments for an in home assessment call: 888-633-7947, or visit Thinksmartthinkgreen.com.  

 There are also tax credits for making energy efficient improvements to your home, and once you have made these improvements, the EPA and DOE provide a variety of marketing materials to help educate homeowners about Home Performance with ENERGY STAR.

This Week’s Real Estate Insight:

This is a great time to improve the energy efficiency of your home and not only save on utility bills but also increase the value of your home. According to The National Association of Home Builders, 64% of respondents prefer a “green built home.”  And according to NAR’s most recent homebuyers survey 65% of those responding indicated that an energy-efficient home was “very important”.  

The National Association of Realtors revealed August sales of existing homes were down 10.7 % from last year  while the median home price fell 9.5 %.  In the Northeast,  sales dropped  15.0 % below a year ago, with the median price  $271,000, down 3.8 % from August 2007.
So with everyone scared about the value of their homes, why is National Grid trying to devalue them  even more?  They are  laying  high-pressure gas lines to to replace the existing pipes that date to the 1860’s. For safety reasons and to make inspections and shutdowns easier, they  want to move meters from the basement to the exterior of the house, and in several neighborhoods have placed them right on the front of the house! There have been well attended meetings at The West Broadway Neighborhood Association to  address the situation not just for themselves , but for the whole state. National Grid has been laying about seven miles of high-pressure line a year for the last six years, and  plans to increase that to 25 miles a year.  

 I spoke at the Public Utilities Commission hearing last week.  I feel that while  special consideration in regards to Historic Homes is a positive development, the exclusion of other housing stock is short-sighted. Eventually, every home will reflect some type of historic significance. What was once sold for tear-down just a few years ago,  a pristine home from the 1950s or 1960s has become a “mid century masterpiece”,  and  is now considered a candidate for historic preservation. If this home has an unsightly gas meter on the façade, it makes for at least aesthetic devaluation if not lower resale value. I urged National Grid to take all homeowner’s concerns into consideration as they move forward.

This Week’s Real Estate Insight:

Contact the WBNA at wbna@wbna.org if you would like to help in the fight to keep  gas meters from the front of homes in Rhode Island.

 

 Listen to this week's show here: [47:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download