COAZEH- "cozy"
COAZEH stands for Communities Of Affordable Zero Energy Homes- That's the name of my new venture. I'm out to prove that you can build affordable net-zero rental communities. You can find out more about that here...
The Plan
Purchase Land
The Land
We recently closed on 105 acres of land in central Vermont. It is a mixture of fields and woods with nice views of the Green and Taconic Mountains. The picture above shows just one of the fields on the property. Some of the property that we can't use will be sold off to help pay for the project and some of it will be left for the tenants to use. The fields have great Southern exposure and will be ideal for roof mounted solar. More to come on the land in future posts.
Building net-zero homes as efficiently as possible
I've been working with an architect and a group here in Vermont called Efficiency Vermont. They specialize in helping people build more energy efficient homes. They have been a huge help with coming up with an energy efficient design, incentives, etc.
North View
The homes will be small single level, single family, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and an attached one car garage.
Floor Plan
The floor plans will be very simple. The one above isn't final, but should be close to what we will be building. Again, to keep costs down, we're trying to keep everything simple. I'll go into the details of these in future posts.
We're hoping to build these as inexpensively as possible, so that they are affordable to renters. We're hoping to do that by:
- Maximizing state and federal incentives- Vermont has incentives for green building and there are federal tax rebates as well
- Taking advantage of economies of scale- We're starting off with just two, so that we can get the expenses nailed down, but we'll be moving on to building several of these homes.
- Sweat equity- I'm going to be performing all of the electrical, solar and battery work myself.
Rent them out as affordable as possible
Of course we need to be able to rent these homes out in order to make a profit. In this area of Vermont that rent can't be too high. Rent will include all of the electricity that the solar generates, which should be more than what they need. That electricity will also provide all of the heat, hot water and air conditioning. I won't go into a lot of detail in this blog as this is about the smart home technologies not real estate investing.
Rinse and repeat in another area
Once we get this development in central Vermont up and going, we'll move on to another area where there is a shortage of affordable single family homes and do it again.
Document the whole process
I plan on creating videos and blog post that go into the details of the Smart-ER Home technologies that are going to be used in these homes:
- Energy Efficient Design
- Solar
- Battery Storage
- Heat Pumps
- Building Technologies
So be sure to subscribe to my Smart Home MASTERY YouTube Channel so you don't miss a thing.
...and again checkout the COAZEH website for more general information about the project.