How Green Technology Is Reshaping What Buyers Expect From Kansas City’s Housing Market
Kansas City’s green building market has evolved, with energy-efficient technologies becoming more common and sometimes mandated, driven by rising energy costs and government incentives. While first-time buyers opt for standard upgrades like insulation and electric appliances, luxury homes are incorporating more advanced solutions like solar panels and geothermal heat pumps.
According to The Beacon, Kansas City’s green building market is evolving, with high-end homes featuring expensive energy solutions and first-time buyers opting for standard green upgrades. Twenty years ago, only the most environmentally minded of homebuyers worried much about solar panels, insulation ratings or the value of a heat pump.
Today, all those factors matter in a market where energy bills take on growing importance in homebuyers’ calculations. Green home technologies have become more ordinary, even expected (and sometimes mandated by local building codes). And the planet-friendly standards pioneered a few decades ago have been boosted by improving technologies — though the most dazzling ways to save energy and use more environmentally friendly materials tend to require buyers with beefier budgets.
The cheapest way to make a house greener is to keep it smaller. But other details matter.
Higher-rated insulation and electric appliances have become the standard. Meanwhile, amenities like conventional heat pumps and electric water heaters are becoming more popular among small-budget, first-time buyers. Solar panels and pricier geothermal heat pumps, meanwhile, are gaining popularity in the luxury home market.
“There’s been a lot of progress on this trend towards efficiency and electrification,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “That’s really taken off in the last five years because a lot of people are interested in using less fossil fuels and less energy.”
The shift toward greener homes comes partly because local and federal governments encourage it with a range of subsidies.
Evergy, for instance, gives its electricity customers rebates for heat pumps and at-home electric vehicle chargers.
And the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (which imposed more rules around fighting climate change) offers tax credits covering up to 30% of the costs for eligible clean energy home improvements like solar panels and solar water heaters installed by 2032.
