Rental Property: How to Make It Truly Earth-Friendly

As more people are becoming environmentally aware, they are becoming more comfortable with an earth-friendly lifestyle. Real-estate industry data shows that the more sustainable features a property have, the more appealing it is to the new generation of investors and renters. 

A big perk of sustainable developments in the real estate industry is that homes can be customized to the desired level of ‘eco-friendliness’ to create a perfect balance between low carbon footprint and comfort. Here are some of the best ways to green up your rental.

Find eco-friendly tenants

Before you commit to adding sustainable features to your rental property, you need to make sure you’re renting out to tenants that embrace an eco-friendly lifestyle. This doesn’t mean you need to be picky and turn away a succession of prospective tenants – it’s all about being selective to whom you rent, as only eco-conscious renters will fully appreciate and use the green additions you make. There’s another bonus of renting to eco-friendly tenants – there’s a small chance they’ll destroy your property and contents as they believe in taking good care of things and repurposing them in the future.

Install smart thermostats

Programmable thermostat not only gives your tenants the comfort of controlling the temperature in the home remotely, using their smartphones or laptops, but also a significant reduction in energy bills. Eco-friendly tenants will always be conscious about how much heating or air-conditioning they use, so a smart thermostat can be a valuable asset when advertising the property. These thermostats can be set to respond to the outside temperature change, and some of them can even learn the occupants’ temperature preferences and automatically adjust throughout the day.

Invest in water filtration

Only a small number of localities have tap water that people love or want to drink. Due to the necessary treatment processes, tap water is full of chemicals and elements you don’t need in your body. However, filtered water you can buy comes in plastic bottles that, unless recycled, eventually end up as waste that needs a millennium to disintegrate. Provide your tenants with healthy tap water by installing a water filtration system and at the same time help reduce the plastic pollution of our oceans and waterways.

Choose a sustainable developer

Investing in rental property in some markets is much easier if you go through a real estate company that is committed to sustainable land development, where new technology uses recovered materials to transform previously uninhabitable areas into prime neighbourhoods. For example, if you want to invest in sustainable rental real estate, you can now find professionals who can guide you through their holistic approach to property development that reduces the environmental impact to a minimum, preserving all the place’s natural assets.

Use eco-friendly lighting

This is one of the easiest sustainable practices, but also one of the most effective ones. Traditional incandescent lightbulbs waste so much energy and heat that they are already banned in many countries in favour of a much more energy-conserving LED bulbs. Quality LEDs might be more expensive up front, but their prices are coming down, while your money returns through reduced bills in a short time. Also, they last much longer than both incandescent and fluorescent lights, and the light output they produce is much more pleasant than alerting yellow or flickering white of earlier solutions. As a new master’s degree in design for urban environment is teaching us,

contemporary design project should be to conceive spaces that evoke emotions and create unique atmospheres, and sustainability lends itself as a perfect tool for accomplishing this goal.

Save water

Responsible water usage is an important aspect of an eco-friendly lifestyle. While it’s up to your tenants how much water they’ll use, certain solutions can help them control the flow. On the outside, instead of unregulated landscape watering, you can invest in automated irrigation systems that activate on pre-set intervals and values, taking into account real-time weather, temperature, and sunrise/sunset cycles. On the inside, there’s a wide choice of low-flow bathroom fixtures from simple aerator showerheads to dual-flush toilets and even greywater systems that reuse water collected from sinks and showers.

There are many benefits to making your rental property eco-friendly. First, you’ll have higher chances of attracting eco-conscious tenants, who will probably take greater care of your property, while in return their energy and water bills will be reduced. Investing in sustainable development has its set of perks, and if you ever decide to sell, properties with sustainable features in place always command a higher price.