Do mandated green initiatives in this vein have a history of eating into the profits of construction companies in the UK?
At a naive, laymen’s first glance I’d imagine it creates opportunity for more!
At a naive, laymen’s first glance I’d imagine it creates opportunity for more!
Consequently, developers tend to build houses that are barely functional as such, with all sorts of damp/heating/basic liveability problems, but which look impressive.
Green initiatives are a sort of nightmare for developers, because the energy efficiency of a house is a cold, uninteresting metric that is not immediately present to the potential buyer.
Consider windows, for example. In an unregulated market, the cheapest, most crappy windows are absolutely the optimal choice for a developer. The fact that they are going to be drafty, break within the first few months, and quickly become covered in mold is simply impossible for a buyer to know, before they've lived in the house for a year or so.
Green windows, however, have to meet energy efficiency ratings - which means they must actually work. They have to keep cold out and heat in, or vice-versa. They can't be giant condensators. They probably don't look quite so pretty, and much worse, they are far more expensive. So the developer actually loses perceived property value, while paying more!
I wonder if this couldn't be mitigated somewhat by a clause that makes the developer liable for all problems in the first year. (I know one potential loophole would be that the developer could use a proxy to "buy" from themselves and hold for a year, but it seems like that could be appropriately handled through existing or minimally altered fraud laws.) It's hard to see how we could get from our present situation to something like that, but it might improve craftsmanship, but would also make new houses even more expensive.
Developers are just like any other complex corporation. Quality is just one thing that has to be balanced. And it is a market with massive pent up demand and buyers everywhere. And customers who have very little choice after they have signed on the dotted line.
I now live in the Netherlands, and in the 80s, developers also started to pull this shit. Soon the lawsuits came, and very quickly they learned not to do this.
Most Dutch people have both comprehensive house insurance _and_ legal insurance!
The ideal situation in my experience is to find a home maybe 10 years old. Problems don't necessarily become evident the first year.
Then again homes of any age have issues creep in, so maybe there's always risks.