Todd Usher has been building high-performance homes in South Carolina’s Upstate for 24 years, and in that time he’s come up with a pretty simple way to shut down the price-per-square-foot conversation before it even starts. “Pricing a house by cost per square foot would be like buying a car by the pound,” he tells prospective clients. It’s not a subtle line: It’s meant to stop people in their tracks and get them thinking about what they’re actually buying.
Usher, founder of Addison Homes in Greenville, doesn’t sell homes based on cost. He sells them based on value, and he’s confident enough in that pitch that he doesn’t hedge it. “I firmly believe that we provide our clients with the absolute greatest value for every dollar they invest in a home that we build,” he says. He hasn’t built a financial model to back that claim with a hard number, but two and a half decades of building science and client feedback have made him comfortable saying it without blinking.
That confidence starts with who Addison chooses to work with. Usher isn’t interested in convincing skeptics. His approach is to find buyers who are already leaning toward something better and give them the tools to make an informed decision. “If I’ve got to really try to change someone’s mind to think in terms of value versus cost per square foot, they probably are not my target buyer,” he says.
Once a client is in the door, the conversation usually narrows fast. Of Green Builder Media’s Seven Pillars of Value Per Square Foot—energy, water, resilience, health and wellness, decarbonization, equity and investment, and community—Usher has found that most clients connect deeply with only one to three of them. Some care about air quality because of a past health issue. Others focus on how fast their hot water arrives or how their home will hold up in a storm. One current client is choosing every material in the house based on its embodied carbon footprint, something Usher says is still rare but growing.
That client is part of why Usher named decarbonization and resilience as the pillars with the most untapped potential right now. Health and wellness data, he says, still lags behind what builders already know intuitively. “I don’t think we have completely defined what compromises health in housing in a very clear way to communicate to consumers,” he says. He’s hopeful that better data and more storytelling around daylighting, air quality, comfort, and circadian rhythm will close that gap over time.
On resilience, he’d like to see the insurance industry get louder. He compares it to daytime running lights on cars. Once insurers started asking whether a car had them, drivers started caring. He thinks something similar could happen with resilience standards like FORTIFIED, if insurers start rewarding it with real savings.
Addison’s homes are built around a handful of non-negotiables, such as exterior insulation, variable-speed heat pumps, and MERV 16 filtration. None of it is optional, and Usher is upfront with clients about the tradeoffs if they try to cut it. But he’s also realistic about how hard some of this is to sell before move-in day.
He calls the payoff “tangible intangibles.” These are things such as a quieter house or a more-consistent indoor temperature that clients can’t really understand until they’re living in them. He tells the story of a recent client who, a month or so after moving in, told him, “I guess I never knew that a house could just have a temperature.” That’s the kind of comment Usher lives for.
The appraisal gap is one of the industry’s stickier problems, and Usher doesn’t pretend Addison has solved it. He uses the Appraisal Institute’s green and energy-efficient appraisal addendum on every home, mostly to flag to the appraiser that something is different and worth a closer look. But he’s candid about its limits. “I don’t think that the appraisal industry has the depth of knowledge to really understand everything that addendum is saying,” he says. The bigger issue, in his view, is structural. Appraisers are bound to recent comparable sales, and in most markets there simply aren’t enough high-performance homes to comp against.
Of all seven pillars, decarbonization has been the hardest for Addison to make real progress on. It’s not that Usher doesn’t believe in it. It’s that the data infrastructure to support it barely exists yet. “How do we accurately quantify embodied carbon? How do we accurately get information from our suppliers, our manufacturers?” he asks. Right now there’s no clean answer, and translating whatever answer does exist into something a buyer can understand is its own separate problem.
When asked how the industry, builders, appraisers, lenders, and buyers together, moves from price per square foot to value per square foot, Usher points straight at the top of the chain, to lenders and insurers. He notes there’s already data showing lower mortgage default rates in ENERGY STAR and higher-performance homes. If lenders started treating those homes as lower risk, and insurers started rewarding resilience, he believes it would pull the rest of the market forward fast. Right now, he says, builders and buyers are meeting each other in the middle from the bottom up, but the institutions that set the rules haven’t shown up to the table yet.
“Code is passing,” Usher says, thinking back on how he now explains minimum-standard construction to clients. “It is the minimum passing grade a house can meet. If we equate that to school, code would be a C minus. Do any of us really want to invest in the most substantial purchase of our lives in a C minus?”
It’s the kind of line that sums up how Addison Homes has run its business for more than two decades: not around what’s required, but around what’s actually worth building.