What do you look for when you first take a property in for viewing? How nice the schools are? Whether or not the schools perform well? If the whole property is tilting on a foundation of damp?
Well, no, you're doing it wrong. If you're counting up bedrooms and scoping out how suspicious the neighbours look, you're looking in all the wrong places for getting a read on how dream a home the property you're viewing can be. Because according to ASA Real Estate, what tenants are increasingly looking out for are sustainability issues when they're searching for a new home.
"Over the year, sustainability has come to increasingly influence our investment decisions and day-to-day activites," management spoke AXA Real Estate's Jean-Francois Le Teno. In English? It means that whether you're looking to sell or buy, having LED bathroom lights, draft excluders and double glazing is a must.
Well, that's what sustainability expert Mike Shufflebotham, who shuffles his botham over at the Green Building Store, says. According to Mike, energy efficiency products such as high-performance timber windows and doors and low flush toilets are hot, hot, hot when it comes to consumer demand at the moment.
"It's definitely on people's agendas," he said. "But it's more on the monetary side of things than anything to do with CO2. People look at sustainable solutions and see the long-term saving of money."
And with spiralling energy costs, it's a trend Mike expects to see more of over the coming years as homeowners look to make the most of the heat their boilers generate and keep the constant, unending supply of miserable weather the British climate is capable of generating out.
"The thing that we have really seen taking off is the interest in Passivhaus," says Mike. "Timber windows are definitely rising up people's agenda and mechanical ventilation heat recovery is really rising as well."
