Wrap Up Your Homes
Home buyers shift their gaze towards warmth and efficiency, and house values react.
The property industry likes reliable patterns. However, since the COVID lockdowns, the search criteria of buyers, and the value of Bristol’s homes have shifted and reacted in some unfamiliar ways, making predictions for demand and seasonal trends sometimes hard to forecast.
City Centre flats fell, briefly, out of fashion as the daily commute to central offices became less important, but returned as people fell in love again with the re-opened bars, restaurants, and the benefits of an urban lifestyle.
Similarly, houses with home working options became highly sought after, as people particularly pined for outside cabins or Shedquarters, as we wrote about in Issue 1.
The Growing Importance of Energy Efficiency
As we move into 2023 and life starts to look more like it used to, albeit a slightly more chaotic and expensive version, there is one conversation topic that our team is frequently reporting back on from buyer feedback, and that is the energy efficiency of homes.
The retrofit of older homes and the green standard of new homes has been particularly interesting to me since we founded Boardwalk in 2015. In 2016 we sponsored the city-wide Bristol Green Doors event and visited a lot of the open houses to have a look at the various means in which homeowners were saving money and doing their bit for our planet.
Our presence at the event sparked several conversations with visitors and hosts alike, as to whether features such as solar panels, rainwater harvesting, external wall insulation, and pellet boilers, really add value to a home. Unfortunately, at the time, the answer was that they didn’t. The knowledge, interest, and demand in both the mechanics and the benefits of such features just weren’t there from the majority of buyers. But that was then, this is now.
The Shift in Buyer Demand
Give this snow globe of a world the shake-up it has had, and seven years on, the green credentials of a home and the estimated cost of bills are something discussed at the majority of our viewings, especially at our new home’s site visits. The government dropping the requirement for a minimum EPC score on new homes hasn’t deterred several smaller, new home developers from making provisions for the future and making the energy efficiency and build quality of their homes key selling points against their larger commercial counterparts.
The Tree Rise development in Hanham has put energy efficiency and longevity of the homes at its core, whilst Steffie Broer and Bright Green Futures have made it their mission to create communities which value sustainability and efficiency with the homes they create.
A 2021 government target to reduce emissions in new homes by 75% seems to be well-bedded in with the developers we are working with, arguable though, this is more down to the buyer’s demands and desires holding them to account for this as opposed to government targets.
Challenges for Bristol's Older Housing Stock
Bristol’s older housing stock faces tougher challenges. Whilst there are some grants available for technology, such as air source heat pumps, this is limited to houses with cavity walls, which severs off a large portion of Bristol’s older, more charming housing stock, unless owners want to first get external wall insulation. However, these much-needed schemes to encourage owners will become far more favorable when working in tandem with a notion that these features are now valued much higher by the buyers looking to become the next custodians of the home.
The Value of Energy Efficiency
How much value energy-efficient technology or simply a higher EPC rating adds to a property is a question that is very difficult to answer and will vary from house to house, and buyer to buyer. We are at an early stage of the green revolution. However, what is becoming clear is those who have invested in their homes to lower bills or to reduce the impact on the environment will now gain a much warmer reception when the time comes to move.
