Healthy Products Boost The Future And Economics Of Housing

Demand For Healthy Products

With increasing cases of homeowners falling ill from what is in their home or in the built environment, they are demanding to understand what is being used in their homes. This is causing a shift away from some traditional products like spray foam, PVC flooring, and formaldehyde-treated products, and driving new products to take their place.

One moment in time that stands out is post COVID when more homeowners became aware of indoor air quality and started looking for high performance ventilation, whole-home filtration systems, and smart air quality monitors. Now, some of the mold-driven respiratory diseases also are driving more natural, breathable, and mold-resistant materials like wool or hempcrete insulation, along with low- or no-VOC paints.

McKinsey reports that health and wellness is a top priority for 84% of consumers for what they want from their home. Homeowners are targeting ways to get better sleep, improved nutrition, and overall wellbeing. Green Builder Media’s COGNITION Smart Data also shows that consumers prioritize features related to the three facets of wellness—physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing—by seeking natural daylight, fresh air, filtered water, and outdoor living spaces as home features.

Consumers are interested in high performance windows that are in the home design to maximize natural light and fresh air flow, as well as built-in water filtration systems, and sunrooms with views of the outdoors and easy access to nature.

The report says the impact on builders and designers can be minimal because wellness design doesn’t have to be complex, and they win because passive, nature-integrated features resonate strongly with buyers.

Not only is demand increasing, but so is the homeowner’s willingness to pay for these features. According to COGNITION Smart Data, 27% of buyers are willing to pay $5,000 to $10,000 more upfront for healthy home features if they reduce long-term homeownership costs and improve quality of life. An additional 23% are willing to spend $10,000 or more.

Healthy Product Demand Is Concentrated

While demand for healthy products exists, Gareth Hayes, senior partner at management consulting firm Roland Berger, says it is focused more on high end homes.

“Wellness, natural light, and indoor air quality haven’t taken off,” he said. “Outside of hotels and hospitals where filtration and indoor air quality are a must have in terms of functionality of the building, we aren’t seeing it take off. In a standard, market-rate multifamily building, health and wellness isn’t winning.”

While smart home connectivity with home products connected to wearables now exists, the uptake is still limited. Hayes believes that homeowners aren’t motivated to spend on healthy for health’s sake, but will make the switch if it impacts their finances.

“On the single family side, the kitchen and bath guys, like Kohler and Moen, have investments that they are building out,” he added. “What impact does whole home water filtration have, how are you infusing water in the shower system, checking bowel movement health–it’s all an extension of the personal health and wellness as a connection to the smart home system. But, it’s still relatively early days.”

He compared the health and wellness movement to the green building movement where now nearly a third of buildings are reaching green certification. With health certifications there is not yet strong activity with code driven initiatives, like removing all formaldehyde, having stronger results.

And, because demand hasn’t yet scaled, green, healthy materials have a supply chain challenge because there isn’t enough material. Those supply challenges are rooted in the collection of raw material.

“If you look at green concrete, it cannot serve all the demand because there isn’t enough material,” he said. “The ready mix guys are 20% of the market and have the capability to make a greener concrete, but if everyone switches, the system cannot handle it. With green steel, construction is the high value use. Where else there is steel and there is a limited supply, where will it go, automobiles, trains, or new building. There isn’t enough to fully transition the market.”

Hayes also believes that there won’t be innovation until a home builder or code demands it.

“If Pulte, Meritage and KB Home want to use only triple glaze windows, there will be innovation behind that and the distribution channel will figure out how to get it there,” he said.

While production builders and codes may help pave the path, some builders and manufacturers are making it priority.

Healthy Product Demand Coming To Life

In Florida, wellness real estate expert with Corcoran Reverie, Bekah Wagner, has been consulting with companies on retrofits to make their buildings healthier.

“In Destin, old school thinking and construction methods are outdated,” she said. “With humidity, we have mold problems, but continue to build with wood and drywall. I also started diving into the health of the land that we’re building on to stop clearing the land so that it stops flooding and then build better buildings on it.”

She’s focused on working with developers and architects to help them understand WELL certification, a program that evaluates and measures how building designs and operations impact human health and well-being.

A recent project she was involved in was claiming healthy because it had cold plunges, but she steered them away from that as green washing and toward design and construction features that would be part of the project’s commitment to healthy living.

“The project has three condos and two townhomes and I wanted them to focus on things that are built in, not just an external amenity,” Wagner said. “I focused on low VOC materials and paints, adding dimmable lights, low voltage for circadian rhythm, EMF shielding in the bedrooms. We included water filtration as well. It is using all concrete, which is best for the area.”

This project represents the big opportunity for better education with the stakeholders in the process, something many others are facing.

A Responsive Healthy Products Supply Chain

To have healthier products installed in homes, change has to happen downstream in the supply chain along with where and how the products are sourced. Many green building programs are taking this on with new production certifications.

Ben Christensen is the CEO at wood marketplace Cambium that is connecting and modernizing the wood economy by salvaging trees, operating sustainability managed forests and helping source and purchase wood from the right places.

“In the U.S., there are about 426 million tons of wood wasted every year,” he said. “That material could be used to replace over half of current demand. We have a giant volume and we are reusing less than 5% today.”

It is no small task to reinvent the industry that has legacy processes in place. Cambium is working on regulatory change on the sourcing side along with creating efficiencies in the supply chain that has known little, especially as a product coming out of a forest and not a factory.

“We collect a lot of data in the process, sourcing data, processing, pricing, environmental data,” Christensen said. “Across those four, we create the best-in-class data set. What we do is focus at the source level to make sure we provide a material that comes in really clean. Manufacturers work with certifying bodies and then we are part of the distribution layer and provide the material on the front end.”

Some groups are working on ways to force adoption in the distribution layer as well. The European DIY Retailers Association (EDRA) and the Global Home Improvement Network (GHIN) published the Low-Carbon and Circular Materials Strategy for Plastics to get to 35% recycled plastic content in the plastics used in home improvement products by 2035.

The group’s Make it Zero initiative will reduce manufacturing emissions by 15% across the DIY sector and will require sourcing mandates, integrating recycled plastics into supplier roadmaps, improved design and manufacturing processes, and expanded use of recycled feedstocks.

Ray Baker, who serves as director of sustainability for the two groups, explained that EDRA’s European focus and GHIN coverage of the rest of the world, brings the combined network to 230 home centers, 35,000 stores in 79 countries that have $2.6B in sales, including The Home Depot and Lowe’s.

Despite the size of the organization, the objectives are still a challenge. Suppliers often don’t provide data on products and sometimes don’t even have it.

With a push on new legislation and product quality, the groups are focused on four areas—plastics in products; reducing carbon in the production stage; steel; and paint and coatings.

“The challenge is how to measure the goals and impact,” Baker said. “The first phase is to get people on board. The bigger retailers and suppliers are well advised, but a lot don’t have the resources or experts on board, so how do we help them with information and tools to reduce carbon when they don’t have internal resources?”

Sometimes, innovators prove that you don’t have to go the traditional route and take it on themselves, despite the challenges, and because it’s the right way to do business.

R&D On Healthy Products Translates To Home Design

The world’s largest homebuilder, Sekisui, is based in Japan and has a different approach to building than has been traditionally represented in the U.S. In 2024, Sekisui brought Japanese philosophies to U.S. living with SHAWOOD homes and communities.

SHAWOOD homes are designed around human experience, including better indoor air quality, low-toxicity materials, natural light and spatial flow, and acoustic and thermal comfort. The clear air, natural light, safe materials and good design contribute to better mental and physical health and is often a benefit immediately felt by homeowners..

“We make homes the happiest place, and making it the healthiest is part of what that means,” said David Viger, the CEO at SHAWOOD Homes. “The most important part is the foundation and the envelope and how tight those tolerances are with the high quality of the Sekisui build because the biggest cause of issues is the air in or water in. Our finished home is already healthier by virtue.”

Viger has a lot of respect for the Japanese ownership’s focus on research and development.

“It’s a secret weapon for us without a doubt—the 60 plus years of R&D history is a gift to us and to the industry,” he said. “We couldn’t find a builder that has invested that much in homebuilding.”

Being customer-centric and continuously listening for feedback means Sekisui is proactive and not sitting back and waiting for healthy products to be delivered. The company takes it into their own hands if they don’t already have or cannot find a relationship that would deliver the right product to specify for its homes.

For SHAWOOD, it isn’t about cutting cost.

“We know we have elevated cost to provide these things,” Viger said. “We really believe if people understand the value of these things go into the house, it will be a very easy decision to them. Cost over value is lost all the time.”

There is complexity to delivering better designs. Much of it cannot be quantified, and some is behind the walls or invisible, but the company takes it on as a duty and responsibility to understand it and deliver as much as possible.

“One thing that is special is that SHAWOOD is light years ahead of the industry–all of our products are moving to healthier options,” Viger said. “It’s not always the most popular piece of business, but it’s so important to this company. It’s difficult to go back in time to find a house that delivers like this, and the future is bright.”

That bright future includes a concept home with a story that is being told by Green Builder Media and is offered as a template for the industry to learn from and adapt to their designs and practices.

The Future Of Healthy Products

The home is evolving and healthy products are a key part of that evolution. The Global Wellness Institute projects the wellness real estate market will top $1.8 trillion by 2030 and developers are already building toward that number.

New certifications are being announced along with new tools to determine the materials, specifications and standards. Green Builder Media’s ESG Defining Principles details every category from major pollutants to air quality to chemical toxicity with elements, metrics and standards and references. And other groups like Mindful Materials are paving a new path to help understand criteria and to specify healthier products for any project.

This is the future–marrying these technology resources to create better designs, to inform homeowners, to increase demand, and to start early in the supply chain to have clean and healthy products in homes.