A green mortgage research project called LENDERS is asking all householders in the UK for their help in completing a survey that aims to gather crucial information about homes, their energy ratings and their actual energy bills.

LENDERS, which is an Innovate UK funded research project chaired by Nationwide Building Society and in collaboration with mortgage lenders, building industry experts, green energy groups and sustainability bodies, looks at ways of moving away from current estimates of energy costs in the mortgage lending process and towards more detailed affordability calculations based on the individual property.

The survey data will be used to produce more accurate information on energy costs and affordability, which in turn can be fed into the mortgage lending process. Detailed data such as this could enable lenders to concede that smaller fuel costs would allow more to be borrowed on the mortgage, encourage buyers towards more efficient buildings and potentially reflect the added value of such properties.

“The survey is critical to the success of our project – the more people who complete, the better informed we will be,” BRE’s Andy Sutton, who is Project Lead on LENDERS, commented. “It takes about 4 minutes to complete and all information gathered will be treated confidentially and will only be used to inform this project. We need to build a large evidence base, so we’d like to urge people to share the survey with friends and family.”

Respondents to the survey are asked to have their Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) and recent fuel bills to refer to, but this is not mandatory. People who don’t have this information readily available can still complete the survey regardless. The survey can be found here.