Lee Williams wanted the biggest home he could afford for his family when he built a new house in Greensboro last year, but he also wanted one that would make a small impact on the environment.
“We probably could have gone a little bigger, but we wanted to be reasonable with our money, and we don’t necessarily need a ton of space,” he says.
It’s a trend builders are seeing nationwide. The era of sprawling mini-mansions peaked in the last decade, and builders are responding to requests for smaller, more energy-efficient homes.
“The average new single-family home will be smaller and have more green features,” according to a 2010 report by the National Association Home Builders called “The New Home in 2015.” The report indicates that the size of completed homes peaked at 2,521 square feet in 2007, dropped to 2,377 square feet by 2010, and is expected to drop to 2,152 square feet by 2015.
Has the trend to smaller homes reached the Triad? Depends on who you ask. Scott Allred, owner of Precept Construction and president of the Greensboro Builders Association, thinks local homebuyers are thinking smaller.
“I feel like people are looking for around 2,100 to 2,300 square feet,” he says. “That’s a very common size now. We just got into a thing where we were building 5,000-square-foot houses all the time. There’s just not a demand for them today.”
But Grover Shugart, owner of Shugart Enterprises in Winston-Salem, says he has not seen a significant change in size. Then again, he says the Triad is traditionally immune to wild fluctuations in the housing market.
“When you look at the national average, that is not what we’re doing around here to start with,” he says.
Home sizes and prices got “out of whack” in places such as California and Florida, he says, but remained comparatively stable here.
“I’ve been in it 45 years,” Shugart says. “In all the other recessions, we never got as bad as anybody, and we never got as good as everybody, as far as increase of prices. But this recession didn’t miss anybody. We’ve all been suffering through this one.”
Both Shugart and Precept specialize in building Energy Star-qualified homes that meet standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. So does Tradition Homes, a two-year-old Greensboro company that built Williams’ home.
“It’s not an option that buyers pay extra for — it’s just a standard feature,” says Gary Hill, vice president of sales and marketing for Tradition. “It gives our customers a huge benefit. They get discounts on their utility bills and save energy. In some cases they save 20 to 30 percent over non-Energy Star homes, and we just think it’s the right thing to do.”
The Energy Star website (energystar.gov) lists a number of builders in North Carolina that build Energy Star homes in the Triad. Williams, 35, didn’t have to look far when he selected Tradition Homes as his builder. He’s the designer/manager for Cabinet Concepts, and he works out of the same Greensboro office building as Tradition.
“I liked their values and the product that they build,” Williams says. “They’re nice and easy to work with, which goes a long way in a stressful process.”
The home he shares with his wife, Stacey, and their infant son, James, was completed in June 2010. Located in northwest Greensboro not far from the airport, it has four bedrooms and 2.5 baths for a total of 2,500 square feet, ranking it above the national average in size. But it has a number of energy-efficient features.
“It’s Energy Star-certified,” Williams says. “We get a discount with Duke Power, which is huge.”
A number of factors went into making the house energy efficient, including the type of central heating and air conditioning unit used, seals around the windows and doors, and insulation in the walls and ceiling cavities, he says.
“Walk into an Energy Star home and you will not see any gaps — no light from the outside,” Hill says. “It’s sealed up very tight.”
A third-party certifier performs a vacuum test after construction as part of the Energy Star qualification process, he says. The test determines whether there are any air leaks in a home.
For two-story homes, Tradition also installs a dual-thermostat system so the upstairs temperature can be set independently from the downstairs temperature.
“The upstairs tends to be warmer in the winter,” Hill says. “A dual thermostat can control that better.”
For Williams, the combination of energy efficiency and modest size suits his family well.
“We wanted a plan that we could use, so we do have a little bonus room, but we don’t have a lot of those extra rooms, like a formal dining room,” he says. “Just because we don’t live that way.”
Contact Eddie Huffman at 373-7335 or eddie.huffman@news-record.com.
