MAKING YOUR HOME GREEN COULD INCREASE ITS VALUE BY 16%
Monday October 25, 2021
Investing in eco-friendly measures could boost your property’s value as buyers are willing to pay a premium
Homeowners who improve the energy performance of their property could add tens of thousands of pounds to its value.
New research by property website Rightmove found that buyers are willing to pay a premium for an energy efficient home.
Sellers who upgraded their home from an energy performance certificate rating from F to a C added an average of 16pc to its value, compared to those that had not been made more eco-friendly.
For a property worth £344,445, the current national average, this equates to an additional £55,111.
Rightmove studied 200,000 homes listed on its website, and which had sold twice, to find how much the change in EPC added to its resale value, adjusting for house price inflation.
Owners who improved to an EPC of C from an E gained an extra 8pc in value and those moving up from an EPC of D added 4pc to the property’s price tag, equating to gains of £27,556 and £13,778 respectively.
Tim Bannister, of Rightmove, said: “While upgrading your EPC naturally needs to be balanced with the investment needed to improve it, we expect that the energy efficiency of a home will increasingly be a priority for buyers in the next few years.
“People are willing to pay an extra premium for a home better designed for the future.”
Boris Johnson laid out the Government’s green agenda last week ahead of the Cop26 climate summit later this month.
The Government has set an ambition for all new heating systems to be low carbon from 2035 and UK households are being offered £5,000 grants to replace gas boilers.
Heat pumps are an eco-friendly way of heating the home, sucking in air to turn to heat, rather than using gas. However, installing a new heat pump system costs £10,000 on average, and can come with a raft of complications.
More than a fifth of British households have upgraded from an EPC D rating or below to a C rating or above in the past five years, according to Rightmove. From 2025, all newly rented properties must have an EPC rating of C or above.
South-east England was the greenest region, with 26pc of homeowners improving their EPC a D rating or below, to a C rating or above. This was followed by Wales, where 24pc of homes upgraded their properties.