It’s a bittersweet time for the owners of the 100K House project homes. Both homes are being put back on the market for the first time since they were built as both families move on to the next phase in their journey through life.

My wife, Courtney, and I are expecting our second child (Mr. Ryker J. Ludeman) in the month of May and desire a division of space in our next house to minimize night time crying battles as much as possible.  Our neighbors in the 120K are moving into a rental as they contemplate a move to the West Coast as they are both finishing up their Masters Degrees in Sustainability. While we’d both love to own these homes forever, we just can’t make it work at this time in our lives.

Yes, many of you commented that a larger family could not work in the 100K. You are right to a degree. We could make it work for a year or so, but there’s something about not being able to close a door to our bedroom for a bit of privacy as the boys get older that just doesn’t sit quite right with us. This house was never intended for a family of four. It has been perfect for us to date and hopefully it will be perfect for the next owner. We think it will.

The 100K will be listed next week most likely for $299K. The 120K is already listed for $319K. The 120K is the one with the orange door on the corner if you are driving by. It has more windows, is 2′ wider than the 100K, has an awesomely wide floating staircase, has a ridiculously huge backyard (by Philly standards) and a fully custom kitchen by Pappajohn Woodworking. This is why it is listed for slightly more than ours on the inside with the green door.

While you’ve come to know these homes well here, some new folks may not know everything about them. They aren’t the largest homes in Philly, but we think they may be the most heavily decorated homes in the city in some key categories. Some of their accolades are listed below:

1. LEED Platinum Certified by the USGBC
2. Energy Star Certified and 50% more efficient than a new code home (utilities bills less than $100 per month on average)
3. LEED for Homes Project of the Year in 2010 awarded by the USGBC (this is a bid deal they tell us)
4. AIA Philadelphia Award Winner (ISA tells us this is a big deal)
5. AIA Pennsylvania Award Winner (ISA tells us this is a bigger deal)
6. National AIA Housing Award
7. Multiple magazine features including Metropolis Mag, Dwell Mag, GRID and GOOD Mag
8. Newsprint mentions including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Business Journal and many more
9. Numerous articles and posts on the top green building blogs and architecture sites around the world

Here are some of the better pics and videos on the project to complete this post. While we are both sad to leave the project, we are also excited to see who the new owners will be and how they will live in the homes.

100K House Postgreen Homes Flickr Set

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Inspired by Design: New Gen, Next Gen by Babelgum

We have talked about simple, mileage-style window stickers for homes before, but for some reason all that talk never led to action. We never actually created one for our own homes. Well, it’s time that oversight was addressed.

I put together a draft version of a window sticker based loosely on the specs from the recent Skinny Project. This is intended to be displayed in the windows of our homes as they are being built. Hopefully, combined with some of our other marketing tools, these signs will help teach people about the most basic differences between our homes and the rest of the market.

The sticker is based largely on the HERS (Home Energy Rating System) Index which provides a means of comparing relative home performance and offers an estimation of energy bills. The numbers presented are obviously just rough estimates subject to the actual behavior of the occupants, but I think they could have value in a comparative environment. Since these numbers are based on a third party standard, they should provide a useful reference when looking at performance across a variety of different homes.

I tried to keep the sticker relatively simple and display the most useful information as prominently as possible. Energy bills get prime placement with the HERS scale coming in second. I also used a bit of space to provide key specs related to performance. The bottom leaves a room for a disclaimer and logos for LEED and Energy Star. The numbers and specs above are just for demonstration purposes, but we hope to give this sticker an actual first run in the upcoming Avant Garage project.

So, what do you think? Could a sticker like this provide a useful resource to potential home buyers? Am I missing any key information? Is the effectiveness of this sign limited by the fact that no other homes will be sporting it?

Let’s talk it over in the comments.

We have been playing around with some new ways to post video to our MLS listings and thought you might like to see where it led. As most of you know, we are on the verge of building four homes in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia under the moniker Avant Garage. These homes, which will feature our coolest interiors to date, are currently available for customization and purchase. Run through the customization tool and tell us what you think. We have made a lot of changes and could use some opinions other than our own.

The video we made, using a service called Animoto is almost like a glorified slide show, but boy is it glorified. I like the initial results, and I think it is a tool we will keep working with in the future. It’s easy to use and there is more flexibility than I originally thought. Feel free to go full screen with it. The high res version looks pretty good.

Don’t worry, this style of video won’t replace our more ridiculous on camera antics, but we think it might play a role in sharing aspects of our projects. I still intend to do a lot of work on the overall format and hopefully will have an update to show you soon, but for now tell us what you think in the comments.

I have a topic for discussion that has been brewing in my head for some time. It is illustrated below in an educatedguessographic about the New Construction Home Building in the US.

Discuss.

Hypothesis: If builders built homes in the “Market Gap” circle, they would sell them. If banks lended to builders that were catering to this market gap, they would be successful.

Every now and then I like to write a quick post about some of the ways in which we market our homes. I know this kind of article is not for everyone, but I hope at least a few of you like them. Those that don’t are free to sit this one out and wait for Chad’s upcoming post on a new low flow shower head. To some that might sound like a joke, but we are actually pretty excited about it.

Most of our marketing to date has been developed in an environment of austerity. The budget for our efforts resembles a teenager’s weekly allowance if that teenager were relatively unliked by his benefactors. Sure, there is occasionally money to do things, and I think we have used it pretty well (postgreenhomes.com). But, for the most part, you could convert our budget to ones, put it in your wallet and still have plenty of room for guitar lesson coupons (reference anyone?).

Fortunately for us, there are plenty of free or relatively inexpensive ways to make a lot of noise these days. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets have given us space to offer useful and interesting (we hope) content. This has, in turn, led to free press exposure and conversations that flow over into other networks.

It also turns out that people like to talk (who knew?). So, we try to give them something to talk about and they often reward us by telling everyone they know. This type of “word-of-mouth” (oh no . . . marketing term) seems to be sparked in two major ways. First, people like to talk about strong technical information or bold provocative ideas that are capable of sparking interesting discussions, or at the very least, making them seem smart, bold and/or provocative. We try to provide this through most of our online content. Second, people like to share examples of other people acting foolishly. Everyone wants to be the source of a laugh, and a good example of ridiculous, potentially embarrassing behavior provides an excellent opportunity to pass one on. This opportunity is something we also occasionally try to provide (with varying success).

Our most recent foray into the latter is our “Special Message to Realtors” series of videos. These are short online videos directed at specific real estate teams with the ostensible goal of introducing our new Avant Garage project. Each video spends a short time speaking about the team in a hyperbolic and somewhat absurd way and follows with a brief intro to the project. The character is a sort of half conceived, exaggeration of myself in a bow tie and hat that barely fits on my gigantic head. The acting is relatively poor. The writing isn’t all that great. But, I might just be making enough of a fool of myself to make these worth sharing. I’ll let you be the judge.

If you can’t see the embedded video, click here to watch the whole series.

While these videos are primarily intended to introduce our project to agents who might bring us buyers, it is possible that they will also find their way to people who have never heard of us. If we, at some point, get the level of absurdity correct, the videos could have another life as a quick shared laugh. This could, in turn, put our work in front of people who would not have otherwise seen it. Some of those people might share enough of a level of interest to stick around, join the deeper conversation and help to strengthen our brand. And, thanks to our willingness to play the fool, these videos are relatively cheap (if not free) to produce.

On a related note, I often say that one of the major attributes Chad and I share is a lack of requisite shame or self consciousness. This, I think, is what allows us to put ourselves in places where the potential for embarrassment is high. I believe that this trait allows us to follow odd marketing paths (see ridiculous, low budget videos) that others might avoid. More importantly, it seems to make it easier to pursue crazy ideas in a very public way, an activity that has often seemed like a mission statement at Postgreen.

So, do you agree that the ability to stick your neck out and risk (or invite) being laughed at can make for better, less expensive marketing? How about for better entrepreneurship in general? Can good, useful content and absurdity share space? Even better, can absurdity be used to deliver useful information? Specifically, what are your thoughts on this video series? Does it have a shot at success on either level?

Let’s talk about it in the comments.

We have talked before about the unreasonable growth in American home sizes even as the average household size continues to decrease. We have also spoken about the need to understand houses based on performance rather than square footage. Often these conversations turn toward educating potential home buyers. Ideas like understandable metrics and car-style performance labeling are usually suggested as a means to teach buyers about benefits of smaller, more efficient homes. The thought is that proper marketing can potentially convert home buyers, but there is a larger more difficult problem which can trump this educational effort. That problem . . . how does one assure that buyers even see your smaller home project and marketing materials when the process of looking for a home is geared to steer them away?

Prior to beginning a home search there is a decision path that potential buyers take. This path whittles home options to a manageable number. Traditionally it looks something like this . . .

• Step 1 -Price
• Step 2 – Location
• Step 3 – Square Footage
• Step 4 – Beds and Baths
• Etc.

Each step down this path eliminates homes that don’t match the determined criteria regardless of their potential other benefits. This is particularly problematic in the square footage category where a well designed smaller home can be eliminated before it even makes its case. Unlike price and location, which have outside factors (proximity to work, budget, etc.), square footage is almost solely a design concern, and a well designed, energy efficient 1400sf could be just as attractive as a 2000sf one. Unfortunately, the person looking for a 2000sf home is unlikely to ever see the smaller house.

One reason this problem might exist is because most real estate agents allow their clients to determine the criteria of their search. They seem to seldom offer alternatives based on their understanding of the market and home buying/ownership expertise. Real estate agents, in many cases, rely on the MLS (multiple listing service) to return search results based strictly on their client’s criteria without suggesting reasonable solutions slightly outside of their requested preferences. This means that even the most appropriate of smaller home projects don’t make it out of the mess of the MLS and in front of potential buyers.

Of course, this is not true of all agents. I’m sure there are many that do say something like, “have you considered a smaller, more energy efficient home?”, but I think those agents are still in the minority. This is not really their fault though either. It is a structural problem with our understanding of home value. The MLS itself makes it difficult to search on any criteria that consider efficiency, sustainability or design. Appraisers have to have their arms firmly twisted to take performance into consideration. Banks claim to offer energy efficient mortgages, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anyone getting one. Size is still firmly in charge of the housing market.

Alright, now I know this post is a bit of a mess, but I wanted to get these thoughts out there so we could talk about them. Obviously we have some ideas about how to get our homes in front of buyers, but I want to hear yours. First though, am I right about this problem? Are good homes being ignored because they are slightly smaller? Who are the culprits behind the aversion to small? And then, how do we keep good, small homes from being ignored?

Let’s talk it out in the comments.

This post is a little cry for help. No, not like the time I got caught pocketing Necco Wafers at the 7-Eleven. This is more of a straightforward cry for help. It is a request for the assistance from our ever insightful readers. Only this time, we are looking for questions instead of answers.

We have recently added an FAQ page to the Postgreen Homes website, but it is hard to be sure we are covering all the common queries. It is also difficult to be sure if the answers to the questions we have captured are sufficient. So, we are turning to you.

If you have time, we are asking that you take a moment to visit our new FAQ page and read it over. Then, using the comments, tell us what questions we missed and what answers seemed lacking. Feel free to be as critical (or complimentary) as you like.

Thanks in advance for your help, and now . . . to the comments.

I decided recently that I would write an occasional post about our marketing strategy. It seems to be something that a good number of people are interested in, and I find that writing about a topic helps clarify my thinking and create new ideas. If you aren’t into this departure from our normal programming, I apologize. Rest assured, we will be back to the green building/design content you have come to expect right after this post.

Business cards are an odd analog moment in our increasingly digital world. They seem a remnant of a distant past where contact information was actually stored on paper. There was something called a phone book and a Rolodex back then. People even sent non-bill related information through the mail. The office hummed along to the sound of fax machines and dial-up modems, and professionals shamelessly displayed email addresses that ended in @aol.com. It was a far cry from today’s digital address books and CRMs, but the business card, like some vestigial organ, has remained.

Even in the most progressive business environment the business card is the norm. At networking events, meetings and even causal meet ups, one is expected to be able to present a concise description of oneself, with attendant contact info, on a 3″ x 2.5″ piece of card stock. This seems increasingly odd as our technology allows us to exchange the same basic info without any kind of physical transfer, and yet it endures.

The business card, I think, touches on a basic desire to exchange something physical upon meeting. It is a ritualized activity in our commerce driven society that calls on something more primal. The card is also reminder made physical. It persists after the meeting in the way a text message, iPhone bump or email doesn’t. It is there when you empty your pockets. It is there when you clean your desk. It is there when you go into that drawer you never open with all the other business cards you have been intending on entering into your contact database. The card carries with it a piece of the meeting from which it came and has the ability to spark memory in a way particular to physical objects.

The card also transmits information beyond the intended data. The quality of the stock and printing tells us something. The design elements and fonts communicate more than the construct of their words and images. We may never judge a book by its cover but a person by their business card . . . that’s fair game.

I am personally conflicted over business cards. The pragmatic, digitally obsessed part of me finds these antiquated informational scraps superfluous in the face of better, faster, data-sharing methods. This part of me advocates the relegation of the business card to the scrapheap of history where it belongs. But, the designer in me relishes the opportunity to speak in the beautiful language of ink and paper. To create something tangible in a world of one-second web sites and emails that constantly fall beneath the fold. The business card, to this part of me, is like a tiny, insignificant vice. To create a physical thing with so much less impact than the binge-style wastefulness of brochures and pamphlets feels alright somehow. It is just a business card after all.

Well, enough pontificating. Business cards will persist or not without my input and for now, it appears, we need one. In designing the new Postgreen business cards I made an effort to capture much of what it is we try to do online. I attempted to make our digital presence physical in however small a way. The following is what I came up with. I have included all three of the designs for the fronts of the cards and one of the back to give you a full impression of the approach. Take a look, and then, if I haven’t already put you to sleep, read on to get a sense of my thought process behind the design.

The overall design was conceived to mimic the clean, minimal look represented by postgreen.com and postgreenhomes.com. I tried to let the overall feel of the card be compelling without overt explanation. This is, of course, a calculated risk. Nowhere on the card does it explicitly say what it is we do. However, the white space encourages note taking by the recipient, and the hope remains that one will feel inspired to explore through the contact information on the back.

The back of the card features prominent, legible contact information. The intent here is to emphasize the idea of accessibility we are always trying to convey (with mixed results). Hopefully, the exaggerated attention paid to the contact information will encourage the recipient to use it. They should get the impression that the card’s owner wants to be contacted. They should feel that this is the person to call with a question, a critique or, even better, an invite to grab a beer.

The front of the card features a silhouette and a list of “titles” that range from the everyday to the absurd. This is intended to capitalize on our individual personalities as part of the brand. We want to loan ourselves to Postgreen in an effort to make our brand more human and approachable. This isn’t a new idea. Even big companies use this strategy to great success. Apple leans heavily on the personality of Steve Jobs and Virgin is basically buried in Richard Branson. Smaller companies, I think, can get even more out of this type of personality driven marketing, particularly if the people behind it are approachable and interesting (are we?).

So, there is a little look behind my thinking when developing our new business cards. Believe it or not, I could actually expand on the above quite a bit if I felt anyone was interested. If you are interested, or if your particular brand of masochism involves tedious explanations of relatively simple processes, then you know where to find me.

For now, let me know what you think of business cards in general and ours in particular. Do you feel that business cards still play a role in marketing? How did I do with hitting my design goals with these cards? What would you add/subtract from my designs? Should I be less long-winded in the future?

Tell me about it in the comments.

The day before yesterday we discovered that our company site, postgreen.com, had developed some serious health problems. Pages were displaying incorrectly, plugins were malfunctioning and the code looked like a cat had walked across the keyboard at the beginning of each file. Our immediate attempts to fix this issue by upgrading WordPress (our favorite web publishing platform) and Thesis (our favorite WordPress theme) only led to further problems. This might have something to do with the fact that we hadn’t upgraded either in years, but we are more inclined to place the blame elsewhere. So, instead of taking any personal responsibility, we are going to call this a case of middle child syndrome.

This is the problem with having three fairly successful sites, only one of which was designed by professionals (oh how we love you postgreehomes.com). We tend to pay the most attention to the 100k blog (our firstborn) and to making sure we are holding up our end of the content bargain at the Postgreen Homes site (our baby). As a result, our company site tends to feel like the overlooked middle child, and as such, started to create problems to get the attention it craved. Well congratulations middle child. The attention is yours.

Realizing that a misbehaving company site was a bad reflection on the company as a whole we devoted yesterday to dealing with the problem. This involved wiping the entire existing site off our server and starting over from scratch. We salvaged some of the content and recycled a few of our images, but by and large, we rebuilt from the ground up. The result is the site you’ll see if you head over there today. It isn’t completely finished, but overall we are happy with how it looks. Soon, we’ll be able to go back to ignoring it in favor of its more popular siblings.

Now, I realize this post won’t really matter to a lot of you. You are here for the sustainable living, green building and modern design stuff, but I know there are a few out there who are interested in the way we market what we do. I wrote this post for you. A big part of our marketing efforts has to do with our online work, and that work is made considerably easier thanks to the two tools I mentioned earlier, WordPress and the Thesis Theme. We never would have been able to build an entire site in a day without those two components. If you are a small business with an “empty pockets” marketing budget, we couldn’t recommend these web tools more highly. This is not to say that we don’t think professional design is worth paying for . . . it is. All of our sites will likely be reworked by pros at some point. But, we realize the budget constraints of a start-up company, and thankfully these tools exist to help us get the most out of the tiny bit of funds going toward online marketing. At the very least, we hope tools like this will help get rid of the excuse for bad websites among small companies.

So, sorry to those of you who find this a little off-topic, but we hope you will at least look at the site and tell us what you think. We would also be happy to answer any questions you might have about the site’s design. Shout out your thoughts, critiques and questions in the comments.

Disclaimer: I discovered after writing this post that the company behind the Thesis Theme has an affiliate program, and I signed us up. If any of you click on one of the links and decide to buy the theme, we will get a little cut. I would have written this post exactly the same way without that incentive, but we thought you ought to know that you might be providing us with a little beer money.

I took a moment to imagine a strange scenario the other day. I sat back in a comfortable chair, stimulating beverage near at hand and tried to picture myself shopping for a new car. It was an exercise that taxed my imagination but also held an important lesson or two.

When looking for a car we as consumers are relatively well armed. We have copious information available on every possible model in magazines, websites and other media. We also have reports from a variety of consumer protection organizations. We can easily find basic performance specs, long term maintenance expectations, safety ratings and much more. The information is not simply available, it is nearly force fed to us at every turn.

In addition, the vast majority of us have extensive brand knowledge when it comes to cars. We attach certain ideas to each car maker, each brand. This is despite the fact that car manufacturers seem to be trying to erase their brands with ballooning product lines and a lack of consistency, but that’s a topic for a different blog. We still identify certain traits with certain names and this gives us useful knowledge when shopping for a vehicle. This understanding of brand also holds the car makers to their own standards to some extent.

Taking a sip of my delicious Allagash Odyssey I then shifted my daydream journey to shopping for a new home and instantly found myself lost. There is little to no information on homes other than that provided by the builder. Brands are relatively weak and tell me little about the product other than perhaps some hints at location and size. And, there is little to no consumer advocacy information attached to specific houses. This is without even scraping the surface of the existing housing stock. That morass doesn’t even bear a look in this discussion.

There are very few standardized measurements required for homes outside of the basic building code, and needless to say, your average consumer hasn’t spent much time reviewing that tedious document. When shopping for a home there are no standardized metrics on the signs or listings other than the visibly obvious square footage, beds and baths kind of details. In other words, home specs tend to be about aesthetics and size rather than performance. Homes will tell me loudly that they have granite countertops but will rarely say anything about energy use. That is like a car bragging about its leather seats without a word on gas mileage or horsepower.

The other major missing piece in my imaginary home search is recognizable brands. Even local brands are few and far between, if they exist at all. Homes are built, marketed and sold as themselves, divorced from all other homes outside, at most, a given project or development. The exceptions to this might be the large national builders like Toll Brothers or Ryan Homes, but what do their brands really say to us other than something about size, surface level finishes and location.

Brought out of my mental wanderings by the sad emptiness of my glass I reflect for a moment on my journey. Why do we not see more car-like brands built around houses? Why are there no “window stickers” describing safety and energy ratings expected by consumers when it comes to buying houses?

I think this shift in the housing market has given us an opportunity to make a change to consumer expectations when shopping for homes. Brands should be established that have to own up to past projects when selling the present ones. Basic performance information should be conspicuous. People should expect a similar, if not better, shopping experience from homes than they get from cars. After all, it is the biggest investment most people make.

Next time I will show you the sticker I would like to see in the window of every new home. Going forward I’ll give you my thoughts on what a home brand should look like and how we might build one. For now, use the comments to give me your thoughts on branding and consumer information in housing. What are some emerging home brands? What existing testing and performance reviews should consumers expect to see? How do we educate buyers to expect certain information? 

Comment time!