Wednesday night Jim McCulley, Joe Gordon and I were assisted by Bob Thornton (Silverstock Builders) in a presentation to the Eastern Shore Building Industry Association at their dinner meeting. We were their guest speakers to introduce green and the NAHB green building program to their members (NAHB had given them our name as a speaker). And what an introduction to green it turned out to be!
The 40 or so members at the meeting were all very passionate about their feelings and questions and this provided for lively discussion and interaction. Heretofore they mostly had not heard any of this firsthand. (In effect we were first responders, much like the meeting was in a restaurant previously a firehouse for first responders.) We first explained what green is and is not, then Bob Thornton described his positive experiences with the benefits he has seen by building green and having built the first NAHB Gold Certified home in the Nation since the program began. Then we provided a surface explanation about how a builder builds green and gets their homes certified by the NAHB Research Center. Finally we concluded the presentation with details as to how their Association can become affiliated with NAHB Green, and the benefits of forming a Green Building Council.
A great deal of the comments and questions were related to identifying how a builder figures out the cost to build green, and how to translate the benefits of green building to prospective new buyers. The session will help us refine future presentations to more clearly address these questions. While we hope we will soon hear from some of the attendees as they consider implementing green building, we are equally excited they may use our help to initiate the NAHB Affiliation and Green Building Council route, same as we did 18 months ago in Delaware.
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