This guest post from Matt, from In the Now Investments and Greenhabbing 101, provides some great information about green real estate investing. Greening your properties and/or your flips is becoming more and more important, especially in the Austin real estate investment market. Read on for Matt?s take on why greening your real estate investing strategy is critical for 2012 and beyond.
To ?green? or not to ?green? ? that is the question that many current real estate investors ask me all the time.? In order for you to answer this question, you need to have a basic understanding of what Green Real Estate Investing is and what benefits it provides you and your real estate investing business.
So what the heck is green real estate investing?
Green Real Estate Investing, aka Greenhabbing is taking an existing property and creating a high performance/detoxified environment inside of the home.? In essence, we are making the home high performance by decreasing the energy bills dramatically each month and we?re detoxifying the home by ridding it of chemicals and only using low to no-voc (Volatile Organic Compounds) paints, stains, etc. to aid in this process.
So what does a high performance/detoxified home mean to you (the investor)?? It could mean a lot of things but here are our favorite benefits of Green Real Estate Investing?.
Here are the 3 main reasons why we decided to ?green up? our investing business:
- Increased Profits ? This should be your main reason for implementing Green Real Estate Investing strategies in your business.? By decreasing the energy bills of a home significantly, you are able to increase the value of your property!? Makes sense right?? Think of how a high performance sports car or a high MPG hybrid vehicle demands a higher price.? It?s the same thing only with your house.? Your home/green rehab project is now high performance and appraisers are trained to assign a higher value to homes that have low energy bills due to your greenhabbing efforts.
- Decreased Competition ? This is another great benefit for us Green Real Estate Investors.? Do you think that homeowners and tenants want to live in our homes?? You betcha!? I mean, who doesn?t want to save hundreds on energy bills each and every month.? You are also decreasing the number of days that your home is on the market (as long as you price it correctly for your local area).? Other real estate investors will start to come to you for deals and advice on how they can turn their rehabs into Greenhabs and increase their profits too.
- There was a void in the marketplace – We saw the demand for high performance homes from both homeowners and tenants and realized that there is not much of a supply for this kind of inventory.? You would be surprised how many homeowners/tenants prefer to live in a detoxified/high performance home with many saying that they would even pay more for these conditions.? The best news is that all of our homeowners/tenants save money when they purchase/rent our greenhabbed homes.? They save money because their monthly energy bills are far lower than any other house in the area.? Side benefit ? they are now living in a detoxified/healthy living and breathing space which is huge (especially for families with small children).
Those are the 3 major reasons why we decided that Green Real Estate Investing was something we could no longer ignore.? Of course we are thrilled that we can ?do good and make money? while doing so.? The environment is important to us but the #1 reason that we are Greenhabbers is because we increase our profits on every deal that we do.? As a fellow savvy real estate investor, I think you would agree with that as well J
The facts are that consumers are getting smarter about what they are buying and are very keen on what they are paying.? If you can show them how to save hundreds on their monthly bills and live in a high performance/healthy green home, then you just found a goldmine my friends!
