Meanwhile, DHS is also partnering with the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS), a nonprofit research organization, to use two programs to construct, retrofit, and designate Resilience STAR Pilot Homes, namely the IBHS FORTIFIED HomeTM and a IBHS FORTIFIED for Safer Living® home. DHS says that the “FORTIFIED” designation actually references “peer-reviewed, accredited, scientifically sound standards from globally recognized leaders in the development and delivery of international voluntary consensus standards, such as the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), FM Global, and Underwriter’s Laboratory.”
Third-party evaluators will be IBHS supervised and trained, and they will inspect homes to ensure they meet the DHS resilience standards. If the Resilience STAR program is as successful as the Energy Star program—which has measurably improved energy performance, you gotta admit—then DHS might save homeowners, tax payers, and insurers some real dough.
DHS also points out that the investment required in making a home resilient is “not exorbitant,” and that the Resilience STAR designations, like the Energy Star designation, may even improve a home’s overall value. Plus, participating builders and evaluators may be permitted to use Resilience STAR in their marketing materials.
No matter who installs and inspects the Resilience STAR structures, they’ll need lots of materials from dealers like you, and this opens up a broad opportunity for dealers to offer products that are Resilience STAR compliant. Smells like opportunity to me.
