Phil Crone
Director of Green Building Programs
HBA Staff
Enrollment in the HBA’s Green Built North Texas program is now available for 2009. Last year, thanks to your commitment and the program’s new home verification and registration process, GBNT became one of the nation’s most dynamic and successful green building programs. These efforts earned the program National Green Building Program of the Year honors from NAHB in May, 2008, and brought it to an international stage at the Greenbuild Conference in Boston, where more than 25,000 from around the world attended. Why Join GBNT?
Here locally, and perhaps very soon across the state, GBNT serves as an effective policy tool and is now the region’s green building clearinghouse after forming alliances with the U.S. Green Building Council and NAHB that allow homes built to either of those national programs to also earn GBNT branding. The program’s regional protocol serves as a compliance path for the city of Dallas’s green building ordinance passed in April. The protocol is flexible enough to meet the needs of our diverse membership, but rigorous enough to meet the growing demand among Texas consumers for more efficient housing.
Despite recent downturns in the number of housing starts, demand for environmentally preferable, green, homes continues to grow both regionally and nationally. According to NAHB, the market for green built homes is still expected to double over the next five years. No place is this more true than right here in Texas, which built more than 40,000 ENERGY STAR homes in 2007, easily leading the nation and the next six leading states combined. Included in that number are the more than 1,500 homes built and verified by GBNT members last year.
Our tremendous progress with Green Built North Texas demonstrates how quickly we as an industry are able to diversify, respond to and even preempt market forces. This is why the HBA will continue to expand Green Built North Texas, the only green building program tailored specifically for the builders in this region’s Mixed-Humid Climate. The program’s cost-effective verification process not only offers quality control through independent third party verifiers, but also provides builders with the unique opportunity to list their homes on one of the nation’s first interactive registries of green homes.
GBNT will soon expand the capabilities of its home registry by allowing active builder members to enhance their listings by adding photos of their homes, contact information for sales staffs, exclusive web pages listing only their homes and allowing them to indicate which homes are for sale. GBNT will continue to enhance this sales and marketing edge through its own marketing efforts to drive consumer traffic to the registry.
Associate members can choose from three distinct partnership levels with benefits proven to increase their company’s exposure to builders and consumers leading to valuable new business. All partners are listed on the innovative online Products and Services Directory, which categorizes companies by their products and expertise.
The continued viability of GBNT and the unique marketing, education and advocacy advantages that it offers directly depends on your continued commitment, which is why I urge you to take advantage of this opportunity today.
