Dear Candy:

Why have appraisers have not adapted to the massive movement towards energy efficiency. Indeed, they ignore it.
While the federal government has funded major initiatives to modify existing homes and to provide information on energy efficiency, the MLS and the appraisal industry ignores the significant value added to homes by implementing energy efficiency measures.
Our electric bills in the summer are less than half those of our neighbors as a result of a magnitude of modifications that we have installed.
When one seeks to take advantage of the lowest ever current interest rates to refinance and lock in these rates, the less-than-impressive appraisal types fail to see value in these improvements and they make the statement: “the banks don’t care about that stuff”.
I suggest that of the tsunami of repos that the banks find on their hands, the most unsalable will be those with no trees and no energy efficiency modifications.

Thank you.

Good question, now how do we answer it?

Also, if you’re curious to read about a teeny, tiny struggle they had with the city of Dallas then click here. But keep it on the DL, because more than a few people are unhappy I wrote that article.

Photo by Charles D. Smith AIA

This year’s AIA Dallas house tour, November 7-8, has some truly extraordinary houses designed by some of the very best local architects.  One of the houses, on Labron, we wrote about here many moons ago.  Designed by Kelly Mitchell and Sean Garman, two of the most fun folks around as well as really good architects, it’ll be well worth the price of admission on its own.  And I want to see the rest, so see you there.

Margaret Crow thought that cows stank. Margaret was the elegant wife of Trammell Crow, Jr., a  Dallas property developer who created the Dallas Design District, Dallas Market Center, Atlanta’s Peachtree Center and San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center.

The problem was that without any cows, Mr. Crow would not be able to obtain an agricultural exemption on his extensive properties and would instead pay full Texas property taxes. How the hell, he asked, can you get an ag exemption without any cows? He posed the question to a young CPA at Arthur Young, Crow’s accounting firm, who shot back a memo to Crow saying sir, you can have your agricultural exemption: plant a tree farm.

 That CPA was young Philip Williams.

 ”By 1988,” says Williams, “Every major real estate developer in Texas had a tree farm.”