Tenants of workforce housing are seeing a larger portion of their income going towards paying rent, leaving less to cover expenses, including utilities. Reducing the utility consumption at multifamily properties through implementing energy and water improvements can play a part in helping to lower the associated utility expenses for tenants.

Our Green Advantage® suite of offerings seeks to make workforce housing more energy and water efficient. We do this primarily through the Green Up® and Green Up Plus® offerings that provide borrowers financing incentives for choosing to implement energy and water consumption reduction improvements at their properties and require monitoring and reporting on energy and water consumption over time. Since the program’s inception, we have seen many properties complete their efficiency improvements and have collected enough consumption data to perform meaningful savings analysis.

In this paper, we provide an updated analysis of our portfolio of Green Advantage loans including savings analysis results from a sample of properties. We also report associated property-level data tied to this analysis for loans funded from program inception, August 2016, through the end of the third quarter in 2020. Read the report.

2018-2020 Energy Improvement Cost and Savings

Empty cellAverage Cost of Improvement ($/unit)Average Annual Energy Cost Savings ($/unit/yr)Average Energy Consumption Savings (%)Estimated Simple Payback (years)
Appliances (refrigerators)

$407

$14

0.7%

28.8

Central mechanical (DHW)

$255

$32

5.3%

8.0

HVAC (system replacements)

$920

$94

5.5%

9.7

HVAC (thermostats)

$159

$67

4.7%

2.4

Insulation (building)

$581

$60

3.9%

9.6

Insulation (other)

$75

$26

2.3%

2.9

LED Lighting (exteriors/common areas)

$54

$26

2.4%

2.1

LED Lighting (unit interiors)

$154

$104

6.1%

1.5

Windows

$1,279

$123

7.5%

10.4

Totals

$487

$138

3.9%

3.3