According to Roofstock, a leading real estate investment marketplace and advisory service, the demand for build-to-rent homes is soaring. Why? Because younger generations, financially constrained by the escalating prices of today’s tight housing market, are seeking the convenience and social-life amenities of city living but in quieter, less crowded locations that offer a sense of place. Unlike post-WWII community developments that often enforced undue uniformity in appearance, construction, and even inhabitants to achieve affordability and community, today’s developments are seeking to provide superior design, community diversity, health-consciousness, and sustainability.
Ecomedes has recently engaged with Casata, one such real estate developer with a unique and breakthrough approach to the development of rental communities leveraging the “tiny home” philosophy. Casata communities appeal to the tech-savvy, experiential, and conscience-driven segments of all generations seeking a compact, low footprint home that better meets their lifestyle. Their initial project, Casata Austin, composed of 66 units located 15 miles from downtown Austin, is one of the first micro home rental communities in the United States. Casata is a “micro living community that elevates renting to a whole new level” according to the Tiny House Blog.
Casata will leverage ecomedes’ extensive sustainable building materials catalog and analytics platform to guide the definition of construction kits that meet the highest levels of energy performance, water efficiencies, healthy environments, and recycling standards, while expediting the construction of these communities in different regions of the US to meet exploding demand. By utilizing the ecomedes database, Casata will always be relying on the most up-to-date certification and rating system data from over 40 ecolabels and rating systems covering 8,000 building materials brands with over 750,000 products.
Once Casata’s construction models are defined and the building kits are put into action, Casata and ecomedes will co-develop a Sustainability Impact Monitor for their communities to transparently report on the accumulating benefits of their design/build approach over baselines from traditional practices.
A first-of-its-kind partnership for ecomedes, we look forward to helping Casata integrate sustainability data into their design, build, and reporting processes, and we plan to invest our learnings from this partnership into the growth and utilization of our platform going forward.