a new kind of housing development

The homes cost about 40% less than other 3-bedroom homes in the area that they're in. They come with the land it sits on and shares of ownership in the Village that it’s in. Our Villages will be planned communities with about 1,200 residents that own the entire co-op Village. Featuring an eco-conscious vibe and outlook, we will be the “world’s first” solar-powered housing developers and will have a low water-use-and-waste scheme. Greenlight Villages will be gated, clean, and family-friendly, with multiple parks, playgrounds, rec centers, pools, gyms, and other modern amenities. Even the rec centers will be pure solar-only powered, as there will be no grid power on the property at all.

You will have an efficient, compact-living home: 837sf, 3 bedroom, 1 and 1/2 bathrooms, a laundry room, and a yard.  It is wheelchair accessible, has wood floors, vaulted ceilings, under-cabinet lighting, vista dormer skylights, a stacked washer/dryer, and many other quality grade features.

The home will be self-powering: a power plant on the roof, batteries to store excess solar energy tucked away in a closet, top-notch insulation and windows, and an intelligent screen that tells the homeowners exactly how much extra power they’ve produced that day. 

Most mortgage lenders ask for 5% to 10% down. Depending on where your Greenlight homes is, it will cost abou 40% less than other 3-bed homes in the area. So, for example, if your Greenlight home costs $200,000, then the down payment would be $10k-$20k.

So, start budgeting! When Greenlight arrives in your city, you will want to be ready. We recommend opening a savings account at your bank and asking your employer to direct deposit a small portion of each paycheck.

The monthly costs will vary depending on the size of your down payment. For example, as of 2022 the national average cost of a Greenlight home is $150k. If you can save up 10% for the down payment & can qualify for a 15-year, conventional, low-rate mortgage, then your total housing costs will be around $1,400/month. That includes the mortgage payment (principal and interest, real estate taxes, and homeowners insurance), HOA fee, and all utilities (water, sewer, trash -- and no electric bill).

If you can’t save up 10% to put down, you might qualify for a 5% down payment, but obviously with a slightly higher monthly payment. And it would still be paid off in just 15 years! When you total up all costs over 30 years of each type of housing, a Greenlight Village home costs less than half that of a mobile home, one-third the cost of a condo, and one-fourth of an apartment.

Imagine moving from an apt with a total monthly housing cost of $2,140, and moving into a Greenlight Village Home with a total monthly cost of $1,400. What could you do with that extra $8,880 a year? And, after 15 years, once your home is paid off, image what you could do with about $18,680 extra a year? At that point, you will pay only for the water, sewer, trash, and HOA fee.

Our home designs are truly ground-breaking. Just small enough to be super-efficient, low cost and low maintenance, and able to be powered completely by just the sun alone. But also just big enough to be usable, comfortable, and functional in a way that makes sense for daily life, such as being able to park your cars right at your home instead of far away as with an apartment complex and having a fenced yard for kids and pets, or having your own veggie garden. These are quality of life features that help reduce stress and can improve your health and your life. 

We’ll also have some accessories available like window awnings, patio covers, gazebos, sheds, and even a climate-controlled version of the shed that can be a home office -- so if you work from home, you don’t have to be ‘at’ home. And each one has additional solar panels on them, because, why not?

Greenlight Villages will be built near growing cities where jobs and other opportunities are, but not right in the noisy, congested parts of the city. We are targeting land that is within 40 minutes of the center of larger cities, or somewhat closer for medium-sized city markets. We have a 15-year plan that has over 100 Villages penciled in; they will be near 84 of the largest cities in the southern half of the US.

Think about how a typical house is currently built. First, someone looks for land and buys a lot at full, top-market price. That person pays a realtor, a title company, a real estate lawyer, and a loan company a lot of money to handle the sale. Then that person pays an architect to design just the perfect, unique, one-of-a-kind home for just that particular lot and a homebuyer’s particular wants, needs, and desires. After that, many high-dollar engineers do the complex design work for each of the disciplines of electrical, plumbing, gas lines, foundation, framing, soil samples, roof trusses, etc. Then the city gets involved and they have a hundred regulations and fees relating to tying into the street properly, grading, drainage, etc. Then a building contractor, who makes 40% override on the total job cost, no matter what it escalates to, hires a few dozen different subcontractors to do the work -- and each one has a business to keep profitable and so they each charge accordingly. And it goes on and on like this for about a year until the home is finally finished. 

Now compare that to mass-producing homes in a factory the way cars are built. Imagine what the price of a car would be if you had to build it custom, one at a time?! It’s true that we have to buy the huge tract of land and develop the Village, transport the home by flat-bed truck, place it on its foundation with a crane, and hook up the water and sewer. But which one seems like a better, more cost-effective way to build a home?

By taking this approach, we can make an affordable home that even includes free, pure-solar power.  We understand that site-built homes cost a lot; why can’t a segment of homes be built differently?

We understand you might be skeptical.  After all, you’ve heard of other people who put a lot of solar on their house and it pays only ½ or ¾ of their bill.  Here’s how we do it:

1. Every Greenlight Village Home will come complete with a 15kw (kilowatt) solar panel system on its roof, a 6kw inverter system, and a 40kwhr (kilowatt-hour) lithium house battery system built-in. This system will provide you with all the power you need to live comfortably in the total-electric home, including full climate comfort from a state-of-the-art, high-efficiency, Heat Pump system. All cooking, heating of water, washer/dryer, and everything else a normal home has is powered completely and totally by only the energy from the sun that falls on the roof during the day -- even if there are many cloudy days in a row. 

2. Every single aspect of the house has been engineered and built with efficiency and solar in mind.  The very size and shape of the home is critical.  For example, these homes do not have extra tall ceilings because heat rises and so, with extra tall ceilings, well over half of the energy is spent heating air way above your head that you don’t feel. Forgoing tall ceilings is a small price to pay to completely eliminate energy bills, not to mention help save the planet with 100% zero emissions. Greenlight homes do have vaulted ceilings, but only a slight slant -- to give an open feeling but not cause a thermal problem. In fact, every room in a Greenlight home has a slanted ceiling.

3. Super insulating is vital. We use thick walls filled with polyiso spray foam, which is the world’s best-known insulator  and has over twice the R-value insulation than fiberglass which is used in standard homes. A whole host of other technologies are applied, including some that are proprietary, optimizing efficiency at every step. For example, each home will have its entire roof slanted south.  

Your Greenlight Village Home will not pay any portion of your electric bill -- because you will not have an electric bill! Nor a gas bill! There will be no utility grid service anywhere near your home, and you will not have an account with them at all. You will also won’t have any surprise, sky-high bills some months. 

And you will never have a black-out. When the rest of the town goes dark and suffers in the heat or cold, you can invite your friends over for a party with the AC or heat cranked, every light turned on bright, cooking for your friends, with food they’ve brought, instead of letting it spoil in their warm fridges! (You can even offer to charge their EV if they have one, because every Greenlight home will have free EV charging from the excess power your home creates that isn’t needed for your household.)

Greenlight Villages will be located in the southern half of the U.S. For most of the year, the sun is out for a long time each day and there will literally be gobs of excess power produced from every Greenlight Village Home that will never get utilized.  (You would have to drive 180 miles a day in an electric vehicle to use up the extra power that will be available in the summer!)  

No matter where you live, however, there is always a day of the year that is the coldest, when the sun is out for the shortest amount of time, around the winter solstice.  On that day -- or a couple of days -- you may need to watch what you use and not waste energy. If your home includes any of the solar-panel-capped accessory structures, they will help remove that ‘squeak by’ aspect on those shortest/coldest days -- but they aren’t necessary. 

So yes, this home works on just solar. And we need to encourage other home builders to join us. Until we stop using the dirty fossil-fueled grid for things like single-family residential (which instead could fuel itself, cleanly and sustainably) we will not tackle climate change adequately. The average US household emits 7.5 tons of CO2 greenhouse gasses per year. This is the direction we must head. Please join the movement.

Greenlight Village Homes is an innovative modular/solar home builder and housing community developer. We chose our name, not just to reflect the solar aspect, but also as a way of looking at housing in a new light, focusing on the things that are most important, like efficiency, comfort, security, and affordability. And if it means that we need to sacrifice a little on one-of-a-kind styling for each persons’ house, then that is alright -- because sometimes we need to put the needs of our family, as well as the planet, above our own desires. 

A lot of folks aren’t too picky about having a big-looking house to impress their friends. They just want a nice home and a yard that they can afford. And they want to pay it off as soon as possible, because there’s more to life than just the house we live in. Having discretionary money to spend on the extra things in life -- like savings, travel, clothing, dining, better healthcare, etc. -- can make a huge difference in a person’s or families’ state of mind and outlook.