The number of eco-friendly listings is on the rise, with more homes being built and marketed with features like solar panels or water tanks, according to new data.
Ray White Group Data Analyst William Clark said despite seeing a decline since April 2023, there has been a growing proportion of eco-friendly homes coming to the market over the past three years.
“Green features in housing are becoming more popular, and so the marketing of these green features is also becoming more popular,” Mr Clark said.
“Both homeowners fitting their homes with green features, and agents training to market these features, is more frequent.”
He said there are also a number of changes from state governments that forced homes to be eco-friendly, which is adding to the number of listings.
According to Mr Clark, the proportion of homes with at least one eco-friendly feature in the listing has increased from 17.5 per cent in 2020, to 19.8 per cent in 2023.
Most eco-friendly listings just have one environmentally friendly feature, while only 0.34 per cent have three.
“We see that most listings with green features only have one,” Mr Clark said.
“Though it is also becoming more frequent over time to see two to four and even five green features per house.
“In 2023, we even saw eight listings with five green features.
“These kinds of green listings are more likely to require large lot sizes to accommodate an ‘off-the-grid’ existence and large rainwater tanks.”
Mr Clark said large lot sizes will necessarily exclude places in the inner-city and other high-density areas.
“With regional areas having a higher proportion of houses rather than units, single-family dwellings may retrofit green features such as solar panels and battery packs quicker and more autonomously than units and complexes with large strata groups,” he said.
“This means states, cities and suburbs with more houses and fewer units will see a higher proportion of green listings.”
According to Mr Clark, Queensland has the most properties listed with eco-friendly features.
“There’s no denying that all states have sufficient physical space to support more properties with rainwater tanks and a self-powered grid, but we saw in the results that Queensland, with large amounts of wealth along the coast, had the most green listings,” he said.
“Meanwhile, NSW had a lot of ground to cover in last place.”
In Queensland, Mount Mee had the most eco-friendly listings with 12 out of 13 that were on market over the past 12 months.
In NSW, it was the smaller regional areas that saw the most, with Jiggi having 11 listings out of 13 with eco-friendly features.
In Victoria, Strathbogie had 80 per cent of listings with eco-friendly features, while Springfield in South Australia also have 80 per cent.
Gnangara in Western Australia have 76.5 per cent of listings, Mcnamara in the ACT had 90 per cent, Lyons in the Northern Territory had 63.6 per cent while Battery Point in Tasmania had 90.9 per cent eco-friendly listings.
