Understanding Certified Green Homes - Part 1

Green building has been around for some time for commercial buildings.  Now we are starting to see it take off on the residential side.  For example, in my local market of Elmhurst two green homes just a few blocks from each other popped up on the market almost simultaneously.  They each were built using a different residential green building standard.  It sort of begs the question...what are these green standards all about, and what's the difference to me as a home buyer?

Part 1:  An overview of the most popular certifications

• The US Green Building Council offers the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard, known as LEED for short.  The LEED for Homes webpageprovides details on the program.   
• The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) offers the National Green Building Program.  More details are available on their What Goes Into a Green Home? page.
• The US Environmental Protection Agency/US Department of Energy offer the ENERGY STAR Qualified Home program.  Details can be found on their Energy Efficient Home Features page.
• Cities around the country are offering their own programs as well.  For example, The City of Chicago offers Chicago Green Homes certification. 

The programs each work a bit differently.  For the most part, LEED and NAHB are fairly similar.  They both define a green home through some common concepts.  Then the builder has to set a plan in terms of how the house will be both designed and built to achieve required and optional points in available categories.  The labels are a bit different for each, but LEED and NAHB share several common categories.  For both, projects must address water and energy conservation.  They both require attention on ventilation as well as the materials brought into the home to encourage healthy indoor air quality.  And they both require a thoughtful process around how the specific home is planned and built on its site to reduce the amount of resources required to build it, protect existing vegetation and rain runoff and encourage energy efficiency.   

For both LEED and NAHB homes, the builder must work with a trained, third-party verifier.  The role of the verifier is to review project plans or the building itself to confirm that the green steps the builder says he or she took were actually put into place.  Both programs offer different levels of certification.  And in both cases, certification comes after the house is complete.  Sometimes verification can take up to a year.  It is also possible, and not entirely uncommon, for a house to not earn enough points to actually earn a certification. 

In Elmhurst, the new green homes include a custom home built to achieve NAHB Gold certification, and a spec home built to LEED Silver certification. The family of the custom home moved in on Earth Day.  The home earned it's NAHB Gold certification the next day.  Both homes were recently featured on Chicago Magazine's "Deal Estate" real estate blog.

The City of Chicago green home certification uses similar categories to LEED and NAHB and relies on City staff to verify certification.

ENERGY STAR Qualified homes go through an entirely different certification process.  The program looks exclusively at the energy efficiency of the home as well as the quality of this aspect of the build.  The key difference is that these homes are evaluated primarily based on a third-party energy audit which provides measurable stats on how efficient the home is.  While ENERGY STAR is different from the other certifications it is still closely linked to them.  The other standards either require or provide points for an energy audit, and many homes built to one of the other standards also apply to earn ENERGY STAR certification. 

To offer a more complete solution, the EPA has recently rolled out a sister certification to ENERGY STAR Qualified homes. Now new homes can also earn the Indoor Air Plus certification which address indoor air quality.

The number of certified green homes is growing.  Information about the certification can be a valuable tool for home-buyers as it means an independent party can back up the claims by the builder that the home was built green.  More information on how a green certification can help home buyers in my next post.