Setting Priorities
The best way, many remodelers and energy auditors say, to determine how a homeowner should use the $1,500 tax credit for their home, is to first conduct an energy audit.
“You need to look at the whole picture and decide on priorities,” says Darren Lombardo of Home Energy Solutions , an auditor in Salisbury, Md. “For example, it does not matter how efficient an HVAC system is — the house still has to retain the heating and cooling it provides.”
Remodeler Andrew Shore uses audits to prioritize energy-efficient home improvement options from least to most effective for his clients. “We rank them so homeowners can see what will result in the biggest energy savings. That is critical in providing value. Do not pitch the most expensive things to them, but what is most cost-effective,” says the owner of Sea Pointe Construction, in Irvine, Calif.
Last year, Case Design/Remodeling, in Bethesda, Md., began offering a complementary evaluation to its clients. The evaluation, conducted by Case staff, includes a review of existing equipment and conditions and utility bills. “We then use this information during the design stage to suggest places to improve performance,” says project designer Matt Dirksen. Often small improvements relating to sealing the building envelope result in a greater savings and increased comfort level. “I recently watched a homeowner receive a 9% drop in air leakage simply due to one hour’s worth of caulking and sealing,” Dirksen says.
Case Design/Remodeling clients can also choose to pay for a full audit conducted by an outside firm, such as Amicus Green, in Kensington, Md. This company uses custom software to analyze existing conditions. It then suggests improvements and re-tests the house after the updates have been made. In addition, “using the audit as a baseline, we offer strategies for future changes,” president Jason Holstein says.
The proof, Lombardo says, is ultimately in the client’s utility bills: “When people see a 35% reduction, they know that what I do works.”
Holstein advises homeowners against basing their improvement decisions solely on the tax credits. “It should be more of tie-breaker to assist in the decision. Use the stimulus money as an extra tool to prioritize what you will do.” —N.P.
Offer Ends Soon
Window replacement companies are among the home improvement industry’s most skilled and aggressive marketers. No sooner was the ARRA signed into law than many window companies revamped their marketing to call attention to the tax credits as well as to whatever offers they had crafted around the stimulus.
Vaughn McCourt, director of operations for Penguin Windows, in the Pacific Northwest, says that the legislation’s passage and provisions caught his company off-guard. “We scrambled big-time” to research the act’s language and its implications, he says, then to “get it into our advertising, onto our website, and into our salesroom training.”
Nor was Penguin Windows alone. “What’s interesting to me is how quickly the right people can put something out there in just under 24 hours,” says Joe Talmon, vice president of Larmco Windows and Siding, in Ohio.
Not all companies were prepared to go as far as Larmco or Weather Tight Corp., in Milwaukee, both of which match whatever tax credit consumers earn with a discount of their own.
But many were. And by the end of May, window replacement companies with products that qualified, even if they weren’t heavily marketing or discounting those products, found that tax credits were helping them to close sales. “Everybody seems to ask about it,” notes Bill Clifford, a sales rep for Windows and Doors of Indianapolis Today.
Brien Murphy, of EZ Home Exteriors, in Pittsburgh, who sells two window lines, both of which qualify, guesses that tax credits could boost product sales in the region anywhere from 10% to 15%. “If they need windows, they need windows,” he says. The message: Now’s the time to buy them.
Murphy suggests that the size of the tax credit, relative to the average cost of a window replacement job, “will enable some homeowners to do a whole job instead of half a job.”
That the time is right to buy windows is a message that resonates through all parts of the country. Dale Brenke, president of Schmidt Siding & Window Co., in Mankato, Minn., reports a 10% increase in sales of the company’s Renewal by Andersen replacement windows. After a slow fall and winter, the ARRA credits gave the firm the boost it needed. “Without the stimulus plan, I don’t know where we’d be,” Brenke says.
With the credits set to expire at the end of 2010, companies know that time is limited and they want to make the most of their opportunity. McCourt says that Penguin Windows is preparing a fall campaign that will urge homeÂowners to act now so they can claim tax credits on their 2009 returns. On the Weather Tight website, a button reads, “Click for details; offer ends soon.” –Jim Cory
