We often talk about our mission of building warm, dry and safe homes for those who need them most. In order to stay accountable on this, we engage with the comprehensive, independent national rating Homestar tool run by the not-for-profit New Zealand Green Building Council (NZBGC).

A home is rated on a scale from 6 to 10, judged on performance and environmental impact. Homestar awards points across seven categories: energy, health and comfort, water, waste, materials, site, home management and an optional innovation category. A Homestar assessor will review the complete property, together with each piece of documentation listed on the Homestar checklist for each of the seven main categories.

NZBGC’s Homestar rating has helped us to view our developments with the end user always in mind. It considers planning, design, build methodology and materials used on each project.

Homestar has helped us to consider:

• - public transport and amenity location in planning
• - better thermal efficiency and passive heating and cooling in design
• - construction methodology
• - waste minimisation
• - increased use of sustainable and eco-friendly material
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• By using Homestar to help guide this exploration, we have made some valuable discoveries, such as finding great locally-made products like NZ wool insulation, which is better for the environment and more thermally efficient. Since embracing Homestar principles and seeing its benefits, we have made an internal commitment that moving forward, every new home we build here in New Zealand will adopt as a minimum Homestar 6 principles. It requires a collective effort to update methodology and documentation in each category throughout a build, but ensures we are consistently building better homes.