Like it or not, for consumers in today’s market for a newly built home – especially younger, more price- and interest-rate sensitive ones – a home builder is a homebuilder is a homebuilder.
Product, price, and location may reveal nuanced differences, and offer a finite toolbox of motivators – i.e. incentives. Other than those nuances, in the consumer’s mind, new homes tend to project as a sea of sameness.
Standing out is hard. For Beazer Homes, the commitment and investment in standing out manifests in a better-than-standard practice in sustainability and energy efficiency. The motivator here is bending the cost curve of new-homeowner’s operating expenses in the form of their monthly utilities expenses, and healthier, more resilient homes to boot.
In an interview with The Builder’s Daily, Megan Cordes, Beazer Homes’ Director of Sustainability and Building Science, discussed how this commitment is a key advantage that goes above and beyond a slogan. As Cordes explained, Beazer’s focus on sustainable building practices delivers what they believe is a better home, one that enhances affordability via enhanced efficiency and lower energy bills.
The builder reached its goal last year of becoming the first national homebuilder to deliver 100% of its new homes to match or exceed the Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Home standards. Now, Beazer Homes is building on this success by developing solar-powered communities in various markets.
A deeper dive into Beazer Homes’ sustainability innovations
Beazer Homes’ focus on sustainability and energy efficiency traces back more than a decade. By 2020, the builder had committed to delivering all of its homes to meet the Zero Energy Ready Home standards.
The Trump administration replaced the Zero Energy Ready Home standards with the Efficient New Homes program in October 2025, a change that Cordes said hasn’t had a big impact on Beazer’s strategy since they were so far along in the process by then.
The homes, Cordes said, go above and beyond those standards and deliver healthier indoor environments through tighter construction and controlled, filtered ventilation. The builder has stricter air-sealing targets, reduces HVAC loads, improves moisture control and creates quieter, more peaceful living spaces. Every home additionally includes a balanced energy recovery ventilator, providing twice-filtered air for indoor air quality.
The Beazer team spent several years improving the building process for its energy-efficient homes, and during that time, managed to reduce its build-cycle direct costs in by about half, Cordes said. There were a number of changes that the team made to deliver those operational efficiencies.
For example, Beazer’s operating, design and engineering teams began to build tighter, well-insulated homes with energy recovery ventilators that allowed for smaller, properly engineered HVAC systems – cutting overall tonnage and lowering costs. The builder also renegotiated prices with trade partners once the building process became more efficient, a big factor in eliminating costs.
“The more that we did this and worked with our trades and built muscle memory within the divisions and each market, we were really able to figure out how to do this in a way that makes the most sense for each of those different markets, which really brought costs down as a whole,” Cordes said.
Beazer’s divisions worked through these kinks and figured out what works well when the market was performing much better. Cordes noted this as a major advantage.
“Now, as things are a little bit slower and a little bit tougher, we’re in a place where we’ve already figured it out, and we can take our time to reduce costs and figure out what’s next in a way that I don’t think others have the opportunity to do,” she said.
Why solar communities make strategic sense
Now that Beazer Homes achieved its goal of meeting the Zero Energy Ready Home standards, growing its pipeline of solar communities aligned strategically, both as a consumer value feature and an efficiently achievable operational workflow. Because their homes already use far less energy, they don’t need large solar systems to cover their total demand.
“That’s the benefit of our strategy. We reduced energy consumption, and now we’re adding an appropriately-sized solar energy system on top of that to offset the remaining energy usage,” Cordes explained.
Beazer introduced solar communities in late 2023 and has since built them in Las Vegas, Georgia and Phoenix. The company will soon deliver a big solar community in South Carolina, expanding the product’s geographic footprint. Greenhouse, a 591-lot community that broke ground in Marietta, Georgia, in late 2024, is the largest solar community in Georgia.
In an earnings call in January, President & CEO Allan Merrill noted that communities with a solar product have higher margins than other Beazer communities, although he declined to specify the magnitude of the difference.
Executives plan to leverage this higher margin by growing solar homes to about 20% of Beazer’s product mix by the end of 2026.
Last year, every Beazer Homes division did a solar pilot to prepare to go live with the solar cut-over. These pilots included testing for how solar would work best in each respective market, as well as education for each division about solar strategy. According to Cordes, each division has the flexibility to tailor a solar strategy that works best in its market.
“Our differentiator isn’t just that we flip a switch and do something different in a home. It’s the way that we think through the entire process,” Cordes said.
Some of the solar homes come standard with the house. Others include a lease option, and some include a lease with an option to purchase.
“Different markets did different things. Some of them didn’t include it at all in the standard home; they just offered it as an option for home buyers so they could opt into solar or out of solar. That gave us a lot of data on what works and what doesn’t.
A differentiator that pays dividends
Beazer Homes sees the emphasis on sustainability as a means of lowering costs for buyers. The builder’s typical home uses 50% less energy on average than a typical new home, and the solar-powered house provides even more long-term cost savings.
Buyers increasingly see the benefits of owning a more efficient home. The property is more resilient, the air quality is better, it is better for the environment and most important of all, the utility bills are lower.
“We’re building a better home. It is better quality, more durable, more efficient and costs less to operate. All of these things benefit our customers. A lot of times, people will say, ‘Well, isn’t that more expensive?’ And, yeah, we do spend a little bit more to do this, but when you look at the total cost of homeownership, we are lower. The extra that you pay for a house like this is more than made up for by the savings that you get in your utility bills,” Cordes said.
As homeownership stretches beyond reach for more and more Americans, Cordes sees innovations that reduce long-term ownership costs as vital for the homebuilding industry. These innovations help with marketing efforts and winning over buyers, but that’s not where the benefits end.
“I don’t think it’s just important from a marketing standpoint. I think it’s important from a way that our industry builds standpoint. I think that there’s a real opportunity here for us to show that this is the best way to build,” she said. “I think that this is something that, going forward, is going to be bigger for the industry.”
