More and more REALTORS® are getting their Eco Green Certification these days. This certification is intended to educate REALTORS® on green building practices and to encourage agents to create relationships with green building vendors, who in turn they can recommend to their clients. While I do not yet have that certification, I feel like I have earned one having just built a LEED Certified Platinum level green home in Mill Valley, CA.

You might ask what LEED is and its associated rating system. LEED stands for the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design. LEED has developed what they call a “Green Building Rating System”.

According to the U.S. Green Building Council, “LEED is a third-party certification program and the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings.” There are several levels of LEED building design & guidelines: silver, gold & platinum – the highest level. It works like a point system. You receive points for certain green components that are implemented into your construction project. They all add up to the different levels of the rating system.

Our architect, Kurt Gettman of Gettman-Schow Architecture in San Rafael, CA is an Eco Green Certified Architect, which was one of the reasons we chose him. Kurt, as a side note, was also really great to work with. He listened to our requirements. He did not push his architectural style. He was responsive, reasonably priced and knew the local city building/planning processes inside and out. I believe Kurt’s design and presentation approach played a large part in our unanimous approval by the City of Mill Valley Planning Commission the first time around. Kurt explained to us early on in the process that Mill Valley would require us to “go green” as a condition of approval for our remodeling project. While we were concerned that this may increase our building costs, we completely embraced this requirement as doing our part for the environment. I was also concerned that going green would require us to make compromises on the style of our home. In the end, I don’t think we spent much more and perhaps even saved money on certain aspects of the house. We are also very pleased with the architectural style of our home, inside and out. The most important point to remember is we now have an energy efficient home. We are saving on energy costs moving forward and helping out the environment.

Stay tuned for many of the green building practices and components you can implement in your new home construction or remodeling project.

Posted by:Adrienne Murphy