Interesting question from the blogosphere: "Martha Stewart Green Houses – Who Will Buy Them?" Apparently, KB Home, the fifth-largest U.S. home builder, has a partnership with Martha Stewart which shows a shift towards greener building practices for KB. The reason the partnership gives pause is that the question remains of whether a builder who keeps costs down by building many homes at one time can really incorporate green features effectively into their projects:
Jeff Mezger, KB's chief executive, thinks so. Sitting with Ms. Stewart in the KB Greenhouse "concept home" in Windermere, Fla.– which has a price tag of $380,000 – for an interview yesterday, Mr. Metzger said KB's investment in radically green homes is meant ultimately to make green building more of a reality for high-volume homebuilders. The home features a compost bin in the kitchen island, low-emissive paints, energy-efficient insulation, and a host of energy-saving features. The home is billed as "net-zero," meaning that it produces more energy than it consumes, and it features an electric car charging station in the garage, a sophisticated computer system that monitors the home's energy expenditures and environmentally responsible building materials.
But in order to get to net-zero, Mr. Mezger said, KB had to spend $70,000 more on production costs than a typical KB home of comparable size. Tellingly, KB doesn't yet offer the net-zero features available in the new Martha concept home to consumers. Instead, the company plans to launch a new Martha community next Spring near Windermere where homes are priced in the low-to-mid $200,000s, and some of them meet green standards set by the product rating system EnergyStar, sort of a watered-down version of the super-eco-friendly Greenhouse.
Mr. Mezger said that by highlighting green building practices now, the company will generate more demand for green homes, and entice competition to keep costs of green amenities down.
"By bringing some attention to [green building], we think that these things will become more affordable in the future," he said. New home builders, he added, have an advantage over sellers of existing homes when marketing to environmentally-conscious buyers, because it is far more expensive to retro-fit an older home with green features than to build green from scratch.
To add to his argument, I really liked this quote from the article from Zvi Barzilay, President and CEO of Toll Brothers, Inc, another big builder: "Some [green] things are cost effective, and others are less cost effective. The first iPhone cost a lot of money, but 100 million iPhones later, it costs very little. The demand for certain products will grow, because prices will go down."
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