US Green Building Council Green Building Resources Leading The Industry

Nate Kredich, VP of Residential Market Development explains the importance of green building practices and energy efficiency and the steps that the US Green Building Council is taking to educate home and building owners, builders, and raters about green building.

Full Transcription:

Ben Lack: As the VP of Residential Market Development. What are some of the projects that you are currently working on?

Nate Kredich: Sure. My group is responsible for the residential initiatives for the USGBC. That includes, obviously, our LEEDs for Homes Program which is our residential rating system. It also includes how our remodeling guidelines which are called Re-Green which is not a rating system but it’s a set of strategies and best practices that are out there to try to get remodelers and contractors to try to do their work more sustainably. So those are two major programs. And the third sort of leg of that stool which straddles both the rating system and remodeling is our affordable housing initiatives. One of the neat stories for us and for LEEDs for Homes is we certified now over 6500 units across the country in a pretty short amount of time. And about forty percent of those units are affordable housing units. And so putting together education, putting together  programs, putting together tools that helps us in really all three of those fronts is my team’s job. So as an example we’re putting out kind of a green jobs initiative around the verification of measures for LEEDs for homes. It’s called our Green Rater Certificate Program.

And this is going to allow hundreds if not thousands of folks that are involved in the residential community to get involved with green building and green residential construction. Because honestly even in this downturn, we’ve seen a tremendous surge in interest in registrations and certifications for our program. So right now, we don’t have enough people to go out and do the work. So we want to be able to enable the marketplace to meet the demand for LEED for Homes.

Ben Lack: Do you have a training platform where companies or people that are interested in getting this accreditation certification that they can go to to go get this, either a network all over the country, or do they contact USGBC directly  and get the certification directly through you guys?

Nate Kredich: No. It’s actually a two-fold process. It does require them to sit and study and pass an assessment. So we do require people coming into the Green Rater Program to have residential construction experience. That can be any number of things. They just have to be in the industry. From there, they have to pass an assessment. And then after that, there’s a field component where they actually work on projects underneath experienced professionals out in the marketplace.  So it’s sort of a blend between working with the USGBC organization, but also working with those who have been delivering LEED for Homes since its inception a few years ago. So it’s a nice blend of classroom and practice that we think is really going to help the market get ready surge that we’re already starting to see.

Ben Lack: How many people do you think you need in order to fill up the amount of demand that’s currently out there?

Nate Kredich: Well, I’m going to give you a sense. We see about a thousand units come into the program every month. And those could be all single-family homes. They could be multi-family projects. They can be kind of all over the board. But with a thousand coming in every month, we do see the certifying somewhere out in the future. And, again, I think we’re at this point where we’re just starting to register as far as market share goes. So at present course and speed, I think the answer is thousands. We’re going to need thousands of people out there verifying for the LEED for Homes Program. And what’s good about it is it doesn’t have to be just LEED for Homes. Our program is designed to fit in nicely with other programs that are out there like the Energy Star HERS Network that’s already in existence. Folks that are doing verification for other programs like Southface’s Earthcraft Homes Program. These are folks that have some good experience and kind of kept their toe in the green home water already and have a great opportunity to expand their horizons and do more work. I think it’s definitely going to be in the thousands. Honestly, every time we look at our backlog, we’re just wondering who’s going to end up doing this work.  So we have to make sure that we maintain quality but also acceptability to the information they need to get the job done.

Ben Lack: One of the things that I saw on your site, because there’s a green building home guide that you guys have recently launched a new website, and it’s got a directory for different organizations to post their information on whether they’re realtors or contractors or interview auditors, so on and so forth. Can you tell us a little bit about that initiative and why you guys are launching that website?

Nate Kredich: Yeah. It’s one of the biggest ones we’ve got going on this year. It’s greenhomeguide.com. And we built that because our mission is to transform the entire residential marketplace. You can only do so much of that with a rating system like LEED. So we’re looking for different ways, different tools that we can affect the marketplace. And we did some market research with McGraw-Hill Construction. And what we found was that a very hungry audience out there in the consumer marketplace, but they get a lot of their information from nebulous  places. And what they really want is a place to go to get really hard-fast content but also to be able to network with professionals that do the kind of work they’re looking for.

So Green Home Guide is this blend of content but also community so that you as a consumer can go in research solar, funnel voltaic systems, get a good understanding for how they work. You can actually interact with other professionals to ask specific questions like, “I live in Atlanta, but my roof faces north. Would I be a good candidate for this?” And get a good exchange in information all the way back down to, “Okay, I’m ready to pull the trigger on a solar system. I wonder who does it for me in the Atlanta market.” And so that’s where the directory comes in.

So it’s designed really to be that burning bush for the green home consumer because it’s impossible to anticipate every single question they would ask. So we thought it was very important to provide them with that forum. And they can go into the site, ask questions, and they can see case studies of local homes that have been done. They can then research contractors or builders that do the work. And so connecting those dots, irrespective of LEED or any other program out there, they’re all great programs, and we want to make sure consumers have the right information to make informed decisions. So we’ve built it to be that trusted resource for the consumer. And we’re really excited about the direction and the trajectory we’re on right now. It’s definitely a void in the marketplace.

Ben Lack: Well, I was definitely looking at it before our call. And I have to say, that there already, even in its infancy, there is loads of information that’s on the site. It’s probably taken you guys a while just to compile all the articles and resources that you already have on there. And I’m sure that you’re still in preparations to add more.

Nate Kredich: Yeah, we are. And I think the most robust source of content for the site is that Ask a Pro section where people come in and they ask these fairly detailed questions. Countertop materials is an example. It’s one of the hot subjects out there. What constitutes a green countertop? And the problem is it’s really not a black and white kind of question to be answered. You’ve got materials that have recycled content but maybe they were shipped from overseas. And then you’ve got sort of a carbon pollution tax associated with that.

On the other hand, you might get locally-sourced products, but what’s really inside of it. There’s a great series of questions and answers just on that topic alone, and people are finding us through those kinds of whimsical questions about, “Okay, I’m doing this kind of remodeling project on my home. I’d like to do it sustainably. What are my options?” And being able to interact with other professionals. We’ve got over eight thousand professionals in the database today including, by the way, probably the most robust set of energy raters in the marketplace. This is really something we were really very focused on.

When consumers want to do remodeling projects, we want them to be thinking about the energy efficiency of their home and maybe even getting an energy audit. An energy audit, as you know, they’re not terribly expensive, and they can be really illuminating about some of the issues around your home. So we built up a stable of energy auditors including HERS Raters and BPI as well that are in that database. So if you’re sitting in any marketplace, you probably have somebody that can come out and do that work for you. We just think that’s really fundamental and important and there’s no one destination that we found where you could find all those people. So that’s a great resource that hopefully consumers will start to use as well.

We’ve got several thousand energy auditors, several thousand realtors in there, many builders and contractors. And so we now feel like it’s ready for primetime. We’re going to start pushing more buttons so consumers can find us. So that’s kind of where we are in the evolution of it. The reason that people have difficulty getting financing for green home features is that the appraisal community has a difficult time valuing those features. Partial to that, is that appraisers typically look at comparable properties and the features of those properties when they arrive at their valuation. In the hundreds and hundreds of the multiple listings there is across the country, only a handful today have checkboxes that allow you to say this home was energy efficient. There was an Energy Star home. This was a LEED home. This is a insert other green building program home into their databases.

So bringing you around full circle, people are having trouble finding capital because the data isn’t there to support why somebody would pay slightly more for an energy efficient home. So we have worked on the education front with NAR and, literally, there are 1.2 million realtors that are out there in something called Greening the MLS. And it’s actually at greeningthemls.org. We were one of the stakeholders that helped NAR put together a best practices series of case studies and information so that realtors not only are educated on the benefits of green homes but also how they can in their local market with their local multiple listing service make the changes necessary so that those markets start to gather that same intelligence and data to allow that to happen.

So education very much works hand-in-hand with the capital acquisition process because those who are determining value and as a result, the capital markets that are looking to them to determine value, they need to be educated on these benefits. So, for a long-winded answer, but gives you a good sense for exactly how we’ve tackled it, in a small way, with a partnership an important organization like NAR and then through the education process which I think helps get that message back through to the marketplace.

Ben Lack: What about the financial institutions? Obviously, it takes a little time to get their arms around some of the advantages that your organization is promoting as far as strong green building practices. What steps are you guys taking to help this group better understand the importance of green building?

Nate Kredich: Well, we’re working on legislative fronts across the plains. We’re very supportive of the Home Star legislation that’s coming in as well as the associated financing vehicles. Oftentimes, the property tax, the Clean Air Property Tax programs, the PACE programs  that are going to go with it, to try to make sure that these things can actually get funded and financed. So we’re very active both at the federal level but also the state level in support of these PACE programs because, again, we’ve got about 120 million existing homes and most of those homes were built before we actually had an organized energy code.

So if we can provide a vehicle so that people can take their education but also say, “Okay, now I have means to pay for these energy improvements and, in fact, the savings that I’ll realize in the energy improvements will exceed the finance cost of those over the life of those improvements.” Then we’ve really started to get to the value issue and the value questions. But financial institutions in and of themselves are not adverse to green homes and green home financing. They just need more support from the appraisal community to justify those values. And so that’s why going back through the process with the MLS and with the realtors just to get those comparables out there is really important.

I don’t think it’s peer reviewed or scientific, but there have been a number of studies across the country. Seattle is one, and I saw one recently in Atlanta that showed comparable home prices between those with energy efficiency or green features versus those without were selling quicker, that were selling for more than their peers. So we’re sort of at that tipping point right now, and the information coming in, we just need a lot more of it. And then I think the whole industry including the financial services industry is going to move in that direction.

Ben Lack: Nate, how long have you been with the USGBC, and why do you do what you do?

Nate Kredich: I started in the spring of 2008, and just a little bit about me. I had spent the part of five years in the production homebuilding market out here in California in San Diego. And it’s an industry that I think is inherently American. It’s just something that there’s a great deal of nobility in building a home. And I wanted to stay in the homebuilding industry, but do it on sort of a different angle. For me, I used to go walk job sites and just see the waste associated with building production homes. And it was not only sickening to watch, but it was also important to realize how much cost was associated with it. And the builders themselves can be doing things differently and better, and frankly, they want to. It’s just a matter of education.

So when this opportunity came up, it was just something that I jumped on because, again, it allowed me to stay in the industry which I really do love. I just think there’s something wonderfully noble about building someone’s home, and even more so, to build it in a way that really speaks the quality into preserving the health of the people that are inside. And building a home is not going to cost somebody an arm and a leg because we can afford their energy prices. So these are all the things that get me going in the morning, and I’m just thrilled to be involved in an organization and be part of a movement that’s really headed in the right direction. And the good news is there’s more organizations than USGBC that are working on this. And the nice things is that we all kind of roll in the direction. And I think for the most part everybody sees the opportunity, and we all want to get to the same place. We’re just not getting there as fast of some of us want to, but it’s a fun ride. It’s a fun journey.

Ben Lack: Is there something that you’ve learned now that you’ve been with the USGBC that whether it’s the brand of the USGBC or something about the industry that you didn’t necessarily know or that might have shaped your thinking as you’ve gone through this process of working on all these different initiatives?

Nate Kredich: One of the fundamental things is that a green home, and people think about green in a lot of different ways, but green homes are really nothing more than high quality homes. If you really dice that a rating system like LEED for Homes, you really just find a lot of really smart building practices in there. Trying to reduce the amount of lumber or improve your framing efficiencies. These are not new concepts, but these are things that really are fundamental into building a high-quality home.

And so one of the neat things about being a part of this position and being part of the organization is when you’re having a conversation with a builder, nobody argues the fact that we should be doing things better and should be doing a cleaner and building more healthier homes and more energy efficient homes. It’s just a matter of framing up kind of the why. Why that makes so much sense? And for us, it’s always about the occupant. It’s always about the people that live inside. So for a builder who may not realize that you’ve got forty million folks in the U.S. with allergies and fourteen million with asthma and everyday is just a struggle, you want to be thinking about using low VSC materials. You want to be thinking about the paints that go in the home or the varnishes that go on the cabinet and just realize what an amazing impact this has on their lives.

And so when you’re in those conversations, it’s really easy to get people to do better. And so that’s been the fun. It’s not an industry that really is resisting change too much. There are obviously some financial impediments to being able to get everybody build green right away, but the nice thing is that everybody knows they should be doing better. And for us, our mission is just to give them the tools and the education and the help so they can do a couple steps better. And if everybody did that then we’ll be in a lot better place in a few years.

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