In 2010, five homebuilders were recognized as inaugural winners of the Best Practices Research Alliance Home Quality + Performance award. This month we're featuring Imagine Homes, a southwestern builder based in San Antonio, Texas. We'll examine what sets them apart from other homebuilders and what makes them an Alliance award-winner—as well as a winner of a 2011 NAHB® Green Building Award for Project of the Year, Single-Family Production Builder. To learn more about the Home Quality + Performance awards, visit here.
Imagine Homes is a company used to winning awards. Since its founding in 2006, it has won four ENERGY STAR® Leadership in Housing Awards and two Energy Value Housing Awards® (EVHA). Now it can boast of three National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) awards.
During the NAHB annual conference April 30-May 2, Imagine Homes won 2011 Project of the Year, Single-Family Production Builder for a high performance home in the Cibolo Canyons community of San Antonio, Texas.
Leadership within Imagine Homes has been working with IBACOS since 1997, and the award-winning home was no exception. IBACOS building performance specialists worked closely with the homebuilder on the project, executing all modeling and evaluating both the cost-effectiveness of design features and their proper installation. IBACOS also installed a monitoring system to track the home’s energy use. The home was completed in July 2010.
“We’ve worked with IBACOS over the last 15 years to test and refine ideas, collaborating on new ways to build homes, and that work has all led to where we are now,” said John Friesenhahn, Imagine Homes co-founder.
Imagine Homes was San Antonio’s first homebuilder certifying every home in two rigorous programs, ENERGY STAR and Build San Antonio Green. Imagine later added the U.S. Department of Energy’s Builders Challenge, extending the company’s commitment to high performance homebuilding.
The award-winning home was designed to use 40% less energy than an average new house of the same size built to the 2009 International Residential Construction Code (IRCC). Imagine Homes currently offers homes that are 30% more energy efficient than a typical new home, and Friesenhahn has said that the 40% level is expected to become the new standard for his company.
Friesenhahn added that the monitoring system IBACOS installed is especially important because Imagine hopes to show that the additional monthly mortgage costs of a high performance home can be more than offset by the savings in energy costs.
“IBACOS worked hard to make sure what we did in this house is reproducible across a broad scale, and that is our goal,” said Friesenhahn.
For more information about Imagine’s win visit here. For more information on the award-winning home's features, visit here.
For more information about the homebuilder, visit the Imagine Homes site.
Imagine's award-winning home
