In its September issue Green Builder Magazine featured Home Energy Ratings. The eight page feature “HERS® – The MPG Equivalent for New Homes” provided a history of energy ratings in the United States and included case studies of six large national production builders that have their homes energy rated and markets the HERS® Index Scores of the homes. The feature states that the “Home Energy Rating System (HERS) provides a number rating that makes it easy for consumers to see how same-size homes compare in energy use. The lower the number, the less energy used.” The magazine quotes Craig LeMessurier, KB Home Director of Corporate Communications, “A home is one of the largest and most important purchases a family can make but, until recently, buyers have had little information about what their costs to own a home would be long term. When we buy a new car, we know how much mileage to expect to get. Homebuyers should know the expected performance and monthly energy costs of a home.” Green Builder Magazine features articles on the following national builders and their use of the HERS® Index Score: Meritage Homes Achieves Typical HERS® Index of 61 – Why choose HERS? “Rigor” says CR Herro, vice president of environmental affairs for Meritage Homes, the nation’s ninth-largest builder KB Home Was First with HERS® – Fifth largest U.S. builder KB Home feels HERS® has emerged as the dominate “yard stick” for measuring new-home energy efficiency. KB also pairs HERS® with Energy Star, says Craig LeMessuier, director of corporate communications PulteGroup’s Supports and Promotes Easy-to-Understand HERS – “Pulte has been pursuing energy-efficient initiatives for more than ten years, and began to seriously mobilize our efforts nationwide with HERS® in 2011,” says Jim VanKirk, vice president of marketing for PulteGroup, the nation’s second-largest homebuilder. “A prerequisite for us was sales force training, which was rolled out in October 2011. We wanted to be certain our sales teams could accurately explain the benefits of HERS, and incorporate it into our sales presentations,” he adds. Lennar’s Everything Included Includes HERS – David Kaiserman, president of Lennar Ventures, the third-largest U.S. homebuilder, says HERS® is the building industry’s dominant standard. In fact he says – because so many other green-building programs require a minimum HERS® score – in many ways, HERS® is the predicate for other programs and standards. David Weekley Homes Constantly Improves Its HERS – Seventeenth-largest U.S. homebuilder David Weekley Homes uses HERS® in conjunction with its own Environments for Living (EFL), and has created the David Weekley Homes’s EnergySaver Program. M/I Homes Finds More Satisified Customers and Fewer HVAC Service Calls – M/I Homes, the nation’s sixteenth largest homebuilder, “uses the HERS® Index as the measurement of energy efficiency in our Energy Star homes. We also have the M/I Homes Whole Home Program which features all of our green building, water saving and energy efficiency details,” says Larry Sekely, vice president of national accounts. The feature concludes that “HERS’ builders are employing this dollars-and-sense approach as a strong marketing tool. New homebuyers can use ratings to anticipate new-home energy costs, and thus the real monthly cost of homeownership.”
