Think Brick Sustainability Blog

To many people, this question seems like a no-brainer: either you would build such a house because of the market advantage it provides, or alternatively, you wouldn’t build it because the extra costs reduce your competitiveness in the market.

Actually, I don’t think it’s either of these ‘no-brainer’ answers. Instead, I think the no-brainer response is simpler: to ensure you are still building houses in 5 years.

Regardless of your views on sustainability and climate change, governments at all levels are increasingly regulating for sustainability and the building industry is a prime target for all.

In addition to preparing for future-regulation, there are three other advantages to building demonstration homes that exceed minimum star ratings, namely:

1. Highly-rated homes get their rating from thermal modelling software (eg AccuRate, BERS) and while not complex, do take time to learn and perfect: learning this software now reduces the delay when trying to use it later.
2. Building a highly rated home is not done using a single formula; rather, the modelling software is based on a series of trade-offs that are dependent and affected by things such as location, block orientation, other buildings and landmarks: only experimentation with the software will help you learn how to design highly rated homes at a cost-effective price.
3. Through experimentation with different house designs you can develop new systems and processes to build highly rated homes for the volume market in time for regulation changes: the transition to the higher regulation will cost less money and cause less disruption to the business.

The trade-offs used to achieve high star ratings revolve around increasing sustainability features to balance consumer preferences that decrease thermal performance. For example, a consumer wishing to build on the Western Australia coast is most likely to want large, west-facing windows to view the ocean and the evening sunsets.

To offset the additional artificial cooling required for these large windows, the house design could include double or triple window gazing, large external shading over the windows, and/or internal thermal mass to absorb some of the heat entering through the glass.

Similarly, consumers that use lightweight pre-fabricated materials would require significant extra insulation, shading and/or improved house orientation to off-set the increased artificial heating and cooling required because of the choice of materials.

Beyond learning about these trade-offs through the development of a highly rated demonstration home, the obvious other advantage is marketing. While consumers are still slow to demand and be willing to pay for improved sustainability, they do want to feel like the companies they buy from are making their contribution to the global sustainability and climate change issues.

Further to this, Governments, media and Non-Government Organisations are looking for good news stories to demonstrate and promote sustainability. With the right positioning, these organisations may promote your business and the demonstration home as part of their promotional activities.

In short, builders and developers should build highly rated demonstration houses because it teaches the company systems and processes that will be required by the industry within 5 years, in turn it becomes a case study for media and government, and finally it provides positive PR material that may become free advertising for the business: win-win-win.