Green Home Builders USA Corners a Lucrative Untapped Market in Home Building

It’s hard to imagine now, but as recently as twenty years ago, LEED certification was a relatively obscure badge of honor that most commercial property owners considered as little more than a nice-to-have accolade, if they considered it at all. Today, LEED certification has become all but standard for new commercial buildings throughout much of the world. But the increased focus on green building and design for commercial building over the past two decades has not been reflected in the residential sector, despite a growing demand. Now, Green Home Builders USA is stepping in to meet that demand.

Green Home Builders is new to American markets, but the eco-friendly home-building franchise has been growing rapidly in Australia and New Zealand over the past decade. In those countries, franchisees have found the rare and lucrative opportunity to corner a growing market with little competition. Now, the brand is offering that same opportunity to franchisees in the U.S.

“It’s very rare that someone comes along and dramatically alters or opens up a new marketplace, and that’s exactly what we’ve done,” said Josh Hughes, Green Home Builders’ Operations Manager.

Why so little competition? Hughes says most builders are operating under a fundamentally misguided conception about the role of green building, assuming that the environmental impact of a single home — minuscule compared to a commercial building — is not worth the cost and effort to mitigate. What that assumption misses, Hughes says, is that homeowners aren’t just thinking about their impact on the planet, but about the ways that green design can benefit their own health and comfort.

“This isn’t just about saving the planet — though that’s obviously increasingly a priority among homebuyers as well — it’s about the environments people want to live in,” Hughes said. “You want a home where it is easy to breath, safe to raise your kids, comfortable and efficient. People understand that an eco-friendly home is a happier place to live.” 

Traditionally, green design has widely been considered too costly to apply to residential homes on a large scale. Hughes says that assumption, too, is false. Green Home Builders has designed a host of sustainable solutions for customers with a range of budgets, but even the higher upfront costs are often recouped through energy savings and resales. 

“We work with plenty of budget-conscious customers, whether they are investing in their very first home or downsizing to a tiny home,” Hughes said. “And of course we’ll work with high-end, one-off architectural projects as well. But the key is, regardless of the budget, when you are buying a home, you are making a long-term investment, and the idea that buyers who are in a place to make such an investment aren’t going to do the research and figure out the long-term costs and savings is just wrong. If people have an opportunity where they might pay a little more upfront but they can see clearly how they can make that money back through energy efficiency and resale value, they are going to take it.”

Now, as Green Home Builders USA prepares to introduce eco-friendly residential home design to eager markets throughout the U.S., the franchise is seeking qualified franchisee candidates to lead the charge. This is where other franchises in the green-building space might run into problems. One of major hurdles for developers getting into green building and design is that the standards, resources and information are largely inaccessible. “It’s almost like legal jargon,” Hughes said, “if you aren’t trained to read a contract, it won’t make any sense to you.” 

One of Green Home Builders’ key innovations is collecting and breaking down everything there is to know about green building and design in a way that makes sense to laypeople. “We’ve built a system that allows us to take a builder who has zero experience in green building, and with just a week’s training, equip them with everything they need to know so that they could go to a conference with clients and explain every detail of what we do,” Hughes said.

That quick and comprehensive training allows Green Home Builders to work with franchisees who may not have direct experience in green building but whose personal and professional values align with the brand’s.

“We want people who have a drive to make decisions that have a positive impact on both their business and their community,” said Louis Fennell, Green Home Builders’ Marketing Manager. “We don’t want people who are out there building homes that last for ten years, then going back in ten years to sell upgrades or a new home. Our franchisees take pride in what they do.”

In the first step of an aggressive expansion strategy, Green Home Builders USA is seeking both area developers, who will recruit franchisees and build out new markets, and franchisees themselves, who will introduce the business to partners and consumers looking for green building and design solutions for residential homes. Fennell says he expects to have little trouble finding great people for both roles.

“We’ve built a franchise opportunity that really has no competition in our field, and that's a rare thing, so it’s never a challenge to drum up interest,” Fennell said. “And because we’ve got training down to a science, we can take people with relatively little experience in green building and make them experts in no time. So we’re really just out there looking for good people who see the value of what we do and want to get on board.”

For more information on franchising opportunities, visit: https://ghbuildersusa.com/franchise/