The Revitalist

The Boston Globe reports on the increasing availability of the "green mortgage." The mortgage is offered to buyers of homes with green components that will reduce the home's operating costs. The mortgage operates in a traditional way, except that the bank takes into account the lower monthly expenses for utilities and leverages that extra cash into more buying power (lower expenses = more $ available for monthly mortgage payments = greater loan value = more house). So far, the mortgages have been mostly available to buyers of units in large-scale green developments where the energy savings have been extensively modeled and demonstrated to the bank, like Olmstead Green, a very green development by our friends at the New Boston Fund. Although, I saw an ad on the T the other day for Wainwright Bank's Green Loan program which gives home owners a discount on their mortgage interest rate for making energy efficiency improvements.