Zero Energy Home for Lower Cost: 5 Builder Best Practices

In this Housing 2.0 seminar, Sam Rashkin covers 5 best practices to help you get your new homes to zero-energy or zero-energy-ready. This is the “low-hanging fruit” that just about any builder can grab to help increase the quality of their homes.

I want to make sure to dispel any notion that  we’re going to discuss ways to cut corners, because that is not the case. You don’t want to be known as the builder who does things on the cheap. 

The cost to your reputation as a builder is not worth whatever paltry money you save. A builder who has callbacks because they went with the low-quality choice to initially save a couple of bucks is a regretful builder with unhappy customers. 

Don’t be that builder! Instead, watch this recording to learn how an optimized zero energy-ready home can cost the same or less than a minimum code home. 

While I’m not going to list all 5 best practices here (because I want you to watch this seminar), I will highlight one that can sometimes be overlooked in the “normal” routine: Hold a team meeting early in the design process. (I’ll wait while people groan about attending another meeting.) 

The fact of the matter is, it costs way less money to change things in the design process than it does in the field. Look at it this way: If the customer chooses to modify something halfway through construction, that’s a change order, and you can charge accordingly. However, if you didn’t think things all the way through and you have to redo something… you’re eating that change. 

To prevent this, implement an integrated design process. Get all your key staff together to think through the various systems in the house. This is going to help reduce waste and inefficiency. Make sure to document the outcomes of the meeting so you have a reference point to fall back on whenever it’s needed.

If you’re not already on the zero-energy/zero-energy-ready “train,” you have some catching up to do. It’s not too late, though. This session will show the key building blocks of a zero-energy-ready home and how to optimize them. And if you needed any additional incentive to attend, here it is: these improvements to your company’s process can lead to additional profit, high customer satisfaction, market differentiation from increasingly obsolete existing homes, and reduced customer service calls.

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