Among the next steps to fix housing will be to fix housing finance. Part of the solution would be in changing how mortgages are approved by adding “E” for energy to the time-honored formula for calculating a buyer’s monthly ability to pay to operate the home.
This was an idea Bigelow Homes founder Perry Bigelow brought to Capitol Hill in March 1991, and it would introduce a free market catalyst to build and renovate homes by correcting a loan amount for the actual ongoing operating costs of the home in addition to paying the seller’s sticker price. Bigelow Homes has guaranteed energy costs for its home buyers for more than two decades. Today, remarkably, the theory, verbiage, and conviction that the Leading Homebuilders of America group has adopted as a rallying cry to alter mortgage underwriting and appraisals around energy efficiency, springs directly from Bigelow’s position on the issue.
This is an excerpt from an article that appeared on HousingCrisis.com on May 17, 2010. To view the entire article, go to: http://ow.ly/22qd6. Bigelow Homes is a Builder Partnerships member.
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