Owning a home is the ultimate American dream, and for some of us, we get to go one step ahead and build the home of our dreams. The newest trend is to build green by using materials that are environment friendly, designing spaces to utilize energy more efficiently, furnishing your home with Energy Star rated appliances, avoiding wastage and using natural resources as much as possible. There’s the double advantage of doing your bit to help the environment and cutting back on your own electricity and utility bills. If you’re looking for tips, plans and pointers as you contemplate the green home you’ve always desired, here are a few websites that offer help:

• Green Home Guide: Maintained by the United States Green Building Council, this site offers comprehensive information on green home programs, green remodeling guidelines, how to live green and other resources. Learn how you can get your home LEED certified and other interesting facts here. (The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards which were developed as early as the turn of the century by the United States Green Building Council in order to create the “world’s greenest buildings” awards points in order to certify a building gold or platinum – energy efficiency rates 17 points, water savings add up to 5 points and indoor environment gets up to 15 points; a total of 39 earns a gold star while a platinum branding needs at least 52 points).
• Green Home Building: This site offers a treasure trove of information, plans, designs and other resources that help when you’re starting to come up with ideas for your green home. Besides sustainable designs (eco friendly), you also have vernacular options that focus on local architecture, indigenous material and talent. You can seek expert opinion or buy building codes and other resources.
• Green Building: This building tells you how a green home should be constructed and offers links to professionals in the field. Learn how to go about a green remodeling project or talk to experts on energy to see how your home can benefit.
• Green is Universal: Besides the usual resources to help build sustainable and eco friendly homes that you find on other sites, this one offers a virtual reality exercise where you can play at building your own green home online.
• Building Green: This site offers a live feed of all the news related to green building from all around the world. Other links offer access to green projects, products and articles.

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of international home listings. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

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The Register Guard recently reported that the State of Oregon has given Eugene approximately $200k to clean up the city in advance of the Olympic Trials.

This has been fantastic, and has discouraged graffiti “artists” from polluting sidewalks and signs in parks. It has also impacted Eugene citizens’ perception of their city, and city leadership. Temporarily at least.

All for $200k. I encourage the City of Eugene to make this type of cleanup a long term commitment. Part of a long term plan to renew the city. For all the millions being spent on wooded acreage that the elite 5% of the city uses (and a good thing it’s not all residents, or it would fall to ruin), the city could take a small % of those city/county/state $ each year and maintain the resources closest to residents.

Thank you Olympic Committee and the State of Oregon!

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Avot Media is working with Home Depot to provide in-store “how to” videos for certain Home Depot product lines.

Here’s an even better use of this technology:

1. A home buyer drives by a house in a neighborhood they like, and takes a flyer.
2. On the flyer (or the box if the agent forgot to refill it), is a text number.
3. The person, an avid American Idol fan, knows how to text.
4. They text to the number, and receive a video link.
5. Assuming their phone can handle non-proprietary video, and many do (except that elegant iphone), they watch a video tour of the home.

Or they could just start with Cell Trust,although their products appear to introduce far more feature bloat.

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Which Northwest city was hit hardest in 2007? Difficult to say. Each of these cities were hit equally hard.

However, these cities may have narrowly missed the negative equity tide that washed away markets in a number of California cities, especially Vallejo.

In fact, the charts below suggest that the NW is pulling out of a relatively mild real estate slump.

First, Eugene..

Then Portland..

And Seattle..

Thanks again to Zillow for the amazing “open source” statistics!

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Springfield has pushed through another coup. They are targeting lower class sizes, on average, than Eugene.

Another bold approach for a City that is doing its best to climb out of, and make the best of the Simpsons (ironically, a source of pride)/Anti-anyone-different reputation their community leaders and citizenry helped to cultivate for over a decade.

A magnificent new hospital that Eugene lost, street repairs (in contrast to potholes EVERYWHERE in Eugene), fresh downtown development, a new community policing approach…Springfield is becoming all things innovative while Eugene is behaving like grandpa in the easy chair. Nothing wrong with grandpa’s easy chair; if all you want to do is look in the rear view mirror.

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So Trulia has incorporated Google maps’ Street view into their listings. Here’s an example from a listing in Portland. It’s not exactly a tour of the home. In fact, you can hardly see the home from the street, but it does give you an opportunity to tour the neighborhood without driving to it.

I’m sure that Trulia would like to have a street view for Eugene as well. Unfortunately Google has focused almost all of its Oregon-based Street View photography efforts on Portland, as you can see from this map. If that changes, and Eugene gets Street View images, you will be the first to know!

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I received an email today from Smartups.org, an organization sponsored by Palo Alto Software (my former employer) and the Lundquist College of Business (my Alma Mater). Yes, this city can feel very small at times!

Smartups is holding their first “Pub Talk” on April 2nd. Local startups will present their business plans to a panel of sober, gavel-wielding judges. Ok, I don’t know if they’ll have gavels, and I doubt they will be 100% sober, but how else could they look judgely? Wigs would be an excellent start…

Here is the link, and here are the details:

When: Wed., April 2nd, 2008 from 5:00-7:30 pm

Where: Davis’ Restaurant

Cost: $10 - pre-register now! Or $15 at the door (includes hors d’oeuvres and one free beverage)

What: A presentation of 4 new start-up companies. Each company will have 10 minutes to pitch their company. We will have a panel of judges who will then have 10 minutes to ask questions. The audience will also be given an opportunity to vote and ask questions.

Popularity: 58% [?]

Joel Burslem over at FOREM posted an excellent review of Roost, a new real estate search engine platform built upon IDX functionality.

He makes some great points, and one especially relevant to a lot of people who visit this site - the listings are complete. You can quickly search MLS listings for multiple brokers at once.

Time to add it to the Find a Home tab..only to have ZERO people come back to visit this blog once they discover how great Roost is!

Popularity: 67% [?]