The SMARTER Finance for Families (SMARTER) aims to drive change in the finance and green certification of new sustainable homes. Backed by the European Commission’s EU H2020 program, 17 organizations from 14 countries have come together to make this change. With third party certification for green homes and discounted mortgages, householders will be rewarded for choosing better quality homes with wonderful benefits such as clean air indoors, bright natural daylight, energy efficiency, water saving, low carbon and less noise intrusion.
The SMARTER initiative will create “on the ground” operational and self-sustaining Green Homes and Green Mortgage (GHGM) programs in 11 European countries. While “energy efficient mortgages” exist, SMARTER brings an innovative approach with a heavy focus on addressing all key stakeholder motivations and concerns with a focus on the end consumer or families that must ultimately choose to use the green finance products created. The full GHGM program has already been tested successfully in one market but the SMARTER project will bring valuable research support to remove real and perceived barriers to the systemic challenge inhibiting GHGM programs’ development to date.
While the prime objective of SMARTER is to introduce “Innovative financing for energy efficiency investments” the most important enabler of this is to create citizen-driven demand for green finance. By demonstrating the benefits of shifting spending attitudes toward a “total cost of monthly ownership” view of the cost of their home purchase or new construction or renovation project and, in doing so, unlocking a critical increase in construction budgets ( often ranging from 15 to 25%) without increasing monthly costs to families. This allows not only buying “less bad” homes but rather buying homes that reach the highest levels of energy, comfort, health and performance while reducing the financial through lower total monthly costs – applying to all housing types from low-income housing to luxury housing and single family homes to multi-unit residential.
Citizen-driven demand will help convince Residential Investors/Developers to build to a high EE/Green standard who will be rewarded with positive market differentiation, availability of discounted finance to facilitate purchasing their homes, and ultimately greater sales and Return On Investment success.
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Funded by: European Commission EU H2020
Country: Bosnia and Herzegovina
Year: 2019-2021
