Assessing your next home - Homestar

Most in the Red Zones will be looking at buying another home, as will many Orange Zoners and those rebuilding in the Green Zones. Whether this home is a new or existing one there will be advantages in assessing various aspects of the property.

Homestar is a joint venture partnership between BRANZ and the New Zealand Green Building Council. They have a free on-line system that is:

"... a New Zealand home rating and advisory tool that examines a broad range of home performance and resource consumption-related issues and is applicable to both new and existing homes.

The tool helps people assess the intrinsic value of their homes using a robust framework adapted from similar tools throughout the world, based around key indicators of warmth, health and resource performance.

A star system is used to indicate the overall performance of the house and ranges from 0-10. A 10-star rated home is an exemplar house across all areas of energy, comfort, health, water, waste, operation, proximity to amenities and material management."

You can use the system to check where you live now, see how the system works and your property scores. Once the property is assessed, a report containing detailed comments and recommendations is provided. This could come in handy for negotiating a price, or assessing a design plan. The report can be downloaded.

It can also be used to compare two or more properties (or design plans) to see how they compare with each other. Using Homestar's log-in system your evaluations will be saved in case you want to revisit them at some stage.

Homestar is here.
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