Do solar panels add value to your house?
Do owned or financed solar panels add value to your property? Energy.gov offers a useful infographic when determining how much your property’s value will go up – check it out here. According to National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s research, each additional $1 in energy bill savings (from your solar installation) adds $20 to your home’s total value.
This rule of thumb varies depending on a number of factors, including:
“The exact numbers vary from state to state, property to property and installation to installation, but in a state like California, for example, a small 3.1-kilowatt (kW) system can add an average of $18,324 to the value of a medium-sized home. The property value advantages of solar energy only increase as you scale up. Installing 5kW of solar panels adds an average of $29,555 to the retail value of a medium-sized home.” *Per costofsolar.com
Please note that these statistics only apply to today’s housing prices and utility rates. As electricity prices go up (as they most certainly will), the advantages of solar energy should rise proportionally.
In addition, installing solar panels not only helps you fetch a higher asking price, but it can also help your home sell as much as 20% faster as properties without solar installations, based on a number of studies.
One thing to keep in mind is that a leased solar unit does NOT necessarily come with the same benefits as an owned solar array. For more information about why leasing a solar panel system will most likely hurts your resale value, check out our previous article: How does a solar lease work?
Installing an owned or financed solar panels is one of the safest and wisest investments you can make.
You enjoy electricity bill savings over the 25 – 30 years of your solar PV system’s lifetime. As utility rates increase, those electricity bill savings grow increasingly large with time. Even if you never sell your home, your installation fully pays for itself many times over.
If you do decide to sell, you fetch a higher premium, which again, more than covers the upfront cost of installing solar panels.
In other words, with the right-sized installation, solar energy is an investment that potentially pays a 200%+ return – far an excess of most any other financial vehicle you can imagine.
