Heating your Home for the Holidays

When deciding on a home to purchase, recent buyers took into consideration a variety of different environmental features. The feature that was most important to buyers was heating and cooling costs. Eighty-four percent of recent buyers found heating and cooling costs to be at least somewhat important when deciding on a home to purchase. Thirty-five percent of buyers found heating and cooling costs to be very important. Using data from the 2015 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, we can see which buyers find heating and cooling costs most important.

• Buyers in the Northeast (42 percent) and the South (38 percent) were more likely than other regions to find heating and cooling costs to be very important.
• Heating and cooling costs were more important to buyers who purchased newer homes.
• Only thirty percent of buyers who purchased a home built between 2000 and 1986 found heating and cooling costs to be very important, compared to 50 percent of buyers whose home was built in 2014.
• Eighty-three percent of buyers purchased a detached single-family home, which was typically a median of 1,900 square feet.
• Seventy-five percent of buyers who found heating and cooling costs very important were repeat buyers.

Heating may not be necessary this holiday season at NAR’s DC office. The forecast in Washington, D.C.shows an unseasonably warm end to the week with temperatures in the 60’s and 70’s. In Chicago the rest of the week is forecast to drop to the mid 40’s.

Washington, DC

Chicago, Il

Via weather.com

For more information on today’s home buyers and sellers view the 2015 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers.