Partners, including BRE, on a green mortgage research project called LENDERS are asking householders for their help to complete a survey that aims to gather key information on homes, their energy ratings and their actual energy bills.
BRE writes:
LENDERS is an Innovate UK funded research project chaired by Nationwide Building Society and involving mortgage lenders, building industry experts, green energy groups and sustainability bodies. It looks at ways of moving away from current estimates of energy costs in the mortgage lending process and towards more detailed affordability calculations based on the individual property.
The data gathered will be used to create more accurate information on energy costs and affordability that feeds into the mortgage lending process. Such detailed data could allow lenders to acknowledge that smaller fuel costs could allow more to be borrowed on the mortgage, encourage buyers towards more efficient buildings and potentially reflect the added value of such properties.
BRE’s Andy Sutton who is Project Lead on LENDERS said ‘The survey is critical to the success of our project – the more people who complete the better informed we will be. It takes about 4 minutes to complete and all information gathered will be treated confidentially and will only be used to inform this project. We need to build a large evidence base, so we’d like to urge people to share the survey with friends and family.’
To complete the survey respondents are asked to have their recent fuel bills and their home’s Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) to refer to, but if these are not available the survey can still be completed. The survey can be found at http://tinyurl.com/jc7wjqa
