Green Mortgages 2.0: Less Carbon & More Money
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Is your mortgage rewarding you for being an environmentally conscious homeowner?
Not many can say ‘yes’, so read on. I was at West Coast Green over the weekend and learned that green home mortgages have undergone a radical revamp, and now help you to fight carbon emissions, boost your wallet and enable you to direct your investment to a complete supply chain of green investors.
The Prototype: Energy Efficient Mortgages
Energy Efficient Mortgages (EEMs) came about in the 1970’s when former President Jimmy Carter challenged government agencies to create home loans that counted energy and water savings as additional income for use in paying debt service. In the past ten years, EEMs from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration have all offered homeowners the opportunity to stretch their debt-to-income ratios by slight amounts, so long as the loan was used to purchase a new energy efficient home or helped to install energy-saving improvements. Unfortunately, the structure of EEM programs ignored the basic realities of homebuying, so they’ve never been a hit. For starters, they do not pay sufficient loan proceeds – for example, the maximum loan amount you can receive under the Fannie Mae EEM is $417,000, rendering the product irrelevant for most of us in high cost markets such as California. Additionally, features such as loan docs and closing costs were not streamlined with today’s market standards, making them seem more cumbersome and less competitive.
The Upgrade: Green AND Competitive
Now private investment banking firms such as Oakland-based Sustainable Capital, are coming to market with a redesigned green mortgages enhanced with best practices in residential rating systems, realtime energy monitoring, reduced interest rates as well as a true green capital supply chain. Here’s how to distinguish the newer green mortgages from their predecessors:
- A smaller carbon footprint. Reducing the home’s carbon footprint is now the goal, as opposed to only water conservation and energy use reduction. The outcome of you having additional income from energy and water savings is still a main goal but the new green mortgages go steps further. Using best practice independent rating systems such as Build-It-Green’s Greenpoint system, a more in depth assessment of the home includes indoor air quality, construction materials, paints and carpets as opposed to merely better appliances, light bulbs and plumbing. Additionally, specialist vendors supply cutting edge monitoring technology, which provides you and the lender with continuous verification of the reduced energy usage and water conservation over the life of the loan.
- Higher loan proceeds and lower interest rate. The loan qualification process and proceeds are comparable to what is on the market today from most banks, fixing a basic problem of the EEMs. Your rate of interest is reduced from comparable current market rates, based in part upon post-financing audits verifying the success of the green renovations and the results of ongoing energy monitoring.
- Integration of incentive financing. The new green mortgages manage to integrate the diverse financial incentives offered to you from other sources such as local utility companies, state and federal governments. So you get additional help in the complicated search for the necessary funds to green your home.
- True green supply chain. The new green lenders source loans using certified Eco-brokers, who are trained to sell green homes and can provide additional support and tips on going through the process of greening the house. Finally, the funded loans are packaged and sold off to socially-responsible funds, concluding a supply chain of totally aligned consumers, contractors, intermediaries, lenders and secondary market sources.
So now you do not have to put up with substandard financing alternatives in order to live (and invest) according to your values. Definitely much better than a few bucks off the closing costs and a new toaster!
Climate Change Legal Risks: Energy Companies Feel the Heat
“Selective disclosure of favorable or omission of unfavorable
information concerning climate change is misleading.”
- New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo to Energy Companies
Check out OneAtlantic.net’s excellent post on the creative use of existing law to sensitize corporate investment practices to climate change risks. Following predecessor Eliot Spitzer’s example, New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo is using an almost forgotten law to investigate five energy companies, which intend to build coal-fired power plants. The Attorney General’s correspondence advises the energy companies that they should have made their investors aware “of the growing potential that they may be taking on big financial risks by building coal-fired plants.” The Attorney General’s overarching thesis is that publicly-traded companies are legally liable for taking undisclosed risks that could diminish their value to shareholders. The goal appears to be one of forcing polluting companies to proactively reduce their carbon emissions.
My synopsis: this investigation, if successful, will propel commercial real estate’s risk management practices and corporate social responsibility into a new millennium — at warp speed.
In commercial real estate finance and investment, hard money liability, regulatory and reputation risk directly affect bank and investor decision making. Such amounts flow through to net cash flow or funds from operations, meaning the potential for deterioration of net asset values and with it, market capitalization and shareholder value.
Real estate investment trusts (REITS), being publicly-traded, should immediately begin to incorporate climate change risk into their corporate and portfolio risk management processes. Their client investors (pension funds, etc.), are probably following this carefully, too, and will start requiring similar reporting disclosures. It goes even further: other investment real estate developers and operators who want to do business with REITS (practically everyone else in the industry) will have to be similarly compliant. After all, no one will take an asset into their portfolio until they are sure that they can understand and economically manage that building’s carbon footprint in compliance with the law and market expectations.
And here’s the competitive advantage angle for Green Real Estate Investors.
In the course of meetings yesterday with a couple of investor clients who already develop green apartments and retail, I asked about their motivations to focus on building green real estate. Besides the fact that they felt it is the right thing to do, they honed in on their perceived risks of not going green. Both developers indicated that they see the potential of the federal or state government passing some form of carbon tax on commercial property as being imminent. They, too, perceived any type of carbon tax as being a direct hit to their bottom lines and, therefore, a valuation risk to their properties. Already being green puts them at a competitive advantage in such an environment.
