Does solar really add value to your home?

Arizona’s housing market will remain in the buyers favor for the foreseeable future, despite recent years of precarious, yet, steady growth and stabilization. Unsurprisingly, the market’s extreme competitiveness and oversaturation is forcing homeowners to sell their homes for unprofitable prices, while prolonging the amount of time it takes their home to sale.

Consequently, homeowners  interested in actually yielding a profit when the time comes to sell are discovering that home improvements such as rooftop solar will significantly increase their home’s resale value and quicken its sale time. So homeowners are tasked with deciding which venture of home improvement (out of the countless possible) will be of the most value. This can be a rather difficult decision, as the purchasing motives of homebuyers are always evolving alongside changing demographics and trending attitudes, and the fact that one home improvement measure can yield higher financial returns than another. So the question to be answered is what in particular, in this day and age, will convince potential buyers to pay more for one home over the other?

Fortunately, the residential features that prospective homebuyer consider when valuing a home is well understood and documented by those in the real-estate. Such amenities like a newly remodeled kitchen, a spacious swimming pool, or close vicinity to a school or golf course are often cited. But what if one home could offer you essentially no electric bill, saving you thousands of dollars a year, while offering the ever growing environmentally minded demographic the ability to live a more sustainable lifestyle. It seems obvious to me that monthly savings and a greener lifestyle is something homebuyers would be willing to pay more for.

This isn’t just my speculation, the evidence for this is overwhelming, as well-publicized and statistical evidence from multiple studies sanctioned by the Department of Energy, Berkeley Cal, and the Journal for Real-Estate Appraisals have concluded that residential solar installations increase a home’s value by $20 for every $1 reduction in annual energy bills, which averages out to a $15,000 increase for every homeowner that went solar.  Talk about a return on your investment!

In fact, installing solar has not only been proven to increase resale value, in many instances solar has proven to outperform other traditional renovations, and for good reason. The logic is simple, just imagine you are on the market searching for a new home and your realtor takes you to view two identical homes on the same block, the only difference is that one home comes with a solar PV system, and the other doesn’t, wouldn’t you rather have the home that comes with no electricity bills? Wouldn’t that home be of more value for you, especially when you consider that energy rates will only continue to rise.
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Thanks for reading and be sure to keep an eye out for our upcoming newsletter bringing you your monthly dose of all things SOLAR!

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