Mortgage rates should be cheaper for owners of energy efficient homes
Owners of energy efficient homes should be given cheaper mortgage rates, since current estimates of energy costs could be inaccurate by as much as £45,000 for a 25-year mortgage for an efficient home, a report launched by UK Green Building Council (UK-GBC) and the University College London’s Energy Institute has suggested.
The research suggests that mortgage lenders could “significantly improve” their calculations if they use current energy data such as the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating for a property. Currently, housing-related energy costs account for 7.2% of a household’s weekly expenditure in the UK.
Richard Griffiths, Senior Policy Advisor at UK-GBC, Co-Author said: “Government wants lenders to be more responsible yet this work shows that they are currently failing to account for the likely energy costs faced by would-be borrowers. As a result lenders are potentially lending more money than buyers of inefficient properties can truly afford and vice-versa for efficient properties.
“If banks took some quite straightforward steps to address this – by including data on properties’ energy efficiency and making more accurate estimates of their likely energy bills – they would reduce the risks associated with their lending while helping to create the conditions that would see energy efficient properties rise in value compared to their inefficient counterparts.”
HeatingSave – making even older homes more energy efficient
The HeatingSave Building Energy Management System helps customers save more than 30% on their bills by optimizing any heating system’s overall functionality. This is done by taking into account a variety of factors, such as internal and external temperatures, occupancy, time of the year, the particular characteristics of installed boilers, etc. All of the data is used in order to determine the best heating patterns for the various heating zones within any building, using our proprietary heat-loss algorithm.
The end result is that users still get a very good level of comfort, while in the same time saving energy and money in the process.
If you’d like to find out more details on all the features HeatingSave has in store, just contact our dedicated product team, they’ll be more than happy to provide you with all the necessary information.
