Whether you listen to Mozart, Meatloaf, or Bruno Mars, music can have a profound effect on your wellbeing. 

When people shop for a home today, they’re looking for more than just a floor plan and a price point: they’re looking for a sanctuary where they can live their best lives.  

Consumers are pouring money into the homes they already have. Their remodeling choices show a desire for homes that cost less to live in, protect the people inside them, and hold value over time.

Analysis shows water efficiency as a powerful climate resilience strategy.

This week’s building news: buyers want lower full costs, heat pumps retain market momentum, and rice husks are becoming siding and decking. Add 97 zero-energy-or-better senior homes and Oregon’s modular mass-timber expansion. Watch:

Green Builder Media’s new ebook shows how builders and remodelers can create homes that deliver what today’s buyers increasingly value: lower operating costs, resilience, comfort, durability and energy independence. 

Mass timber housing, California zoning battles, and vanishing energy tax credits. Catch up on the news shaping better homes.

Free Webinar Tomorrow! Homebuyer priorities are changing fast. Energy efficiency, resilience, wellness, affordability, and high performance are increasingly shaping purchasing decisions.

While housing affordability discussions often focus on monthly rent or mortgage payments, rapidly rising energy costs create a burden on homeowners and renters, too.

Affordability anxiety can stop prospective homebuyers from so much as looking at homes. 

Countertops, flooring, lighting, and square footage are easy to see—but many of the things that determine whether a home is durable, healthy and efficient disappear behind the walls.

People need houses, but houses need people too. 

No housing plan? California’s Builder’s Remedy could limit a city’s control over what gets built. Plus: mass timber multifamily housing, easier electrification of older buildings, disappearing energy tax credits, and rising demand for resilience.

Homeowner awareness, adoption and prioritization of energy efficiency is growing at an incredibly fast pace.  

Could wildfire risk change your odds of getting a mortgage? Plus, EV-to-home energy, plants as building science, the 2024 IECC debate and the return of the “cold room.”

When considering whether to purchase a home, prospective buyers must include immediate and long-term budget-benders such as insurance, property tax, and operational costs. Builders should help them learn all about it.