Luxury home buyers - and low-end ones - are now looking for green features, from solar panels to water harvesting
By Alex Whiting
LONDON, July 26 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Healthy homes, natural homes, earthship homes, off-grid homes, rammed earth homes, strawbale homes - a huge variety of eco-friendly housing is available for the growing number of people in search of sustainable living, estate agents say.
And eco-homes are not just for those in search of an organic, self-sufficient lifestyle - luxury homebuyers are seeking them too, the agents say.
More than 20 percent of emerging luxury consumers - defined as those with $250,000 to $1 million in investable assets - in the United States, Britain, the United Arab Emirates, India and China have their sights set on sustainable or eco-friendly homes, according to research published by Sotheby's International Realty earlier this year.
Luxury homes include a $149 million, 14-bed property in Colorado with staff quarters, a spa, bison pastures, an airstrip, a helipad - and geo-thermal heating and cooling.
Hugo Thistlethwayte, who heads the international residential business at Savills, a UK estate agent, said buyers are increasingly looking for ways to reduce maintenance costs, especially for country houses which can be "money pits".
"If they can do that in an eco-friendly way, then they want to do that," he said.
The push to cut costs and go greener has been helped by the rapid improvement of technologies that cut energy costs - such as solar panels and window glazing.
"A really good eco-home will involve not just (new) technology, but also the oldest forms of technology", including positioning houses and their windows and door so they catch the breeze in hot climates, he said.
That's more likely to happen when people build their own homes, rather than buying from developers.
"If it's a development, it's a bit more about how it looks and the wow factor. So you see a lot of glass in development, but if you're not careful that can turn into a greenhouse," he said.
ORGANIC LIVING
At the other end of the spectrum, house hunters can bag a mud-walled cottage in Portugal with wood burner, a composting toilet, and river water for 50,000 euros ($57,565).
Other options include earthship homes - off-the-power-grid structures designed to use sunshine to produce free heating and built from natural or recycled materials, with added features such as water harvesting.
"Most people are looking for a more meaningful way of life, with a simpler lifestyle that allows more time to connect with the natural world," said David Edge, who runs a website advertising sustainable properties.
He initially set up the website to sell his own off-grid farmhouse in southern Spain in 2011.
"The fantasy of owning your own chunk of land and being able to survive off it is still a driving force," he said.
"If (buyers) aspire to an urban lifestyle then some of the modern, well-designed properties are truly exceptional with their use of (green) resources for heating, lighting."
"However if they aspire to the 'whole package' then a rural property could be better suited," Edge said.
A sustainable lifestyle is not to be taken lightly, he added. "It can involve a large amount of physical work and a change in habits of eating, washing, sleeping, computer usage."
And the cost savings are not always clear. "If you expect life to be just the same as before - with unlimited electricity, water - then off-grid systems are quite costly," he said.
In countries which produce a large amount of electricity from renewables it may even be less environmentally friendly for houses to have their own small solar system instead of being connected to the grid, Edge said.
"However rural properties sometimes have no choice," he added. ($1 = 0.8686 euros) (Reporting by Alex Whiting @Alexwhi, Editing by Zoe Tabary.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women's rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate)
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