ASU Solar Housing Survey

The purpose of the ASU Solar Housing Survey was to examine how rooftop solar PV affected residential real estate transactions in Maricopa County, Arizona. The primary goal was to determine which of three financing arrangements existed at the time of sale of the home. These arrangements included leases with “payments” remaining at the time of sale, “prepaid” solar leases, and “owned” solar PV systems. The hypothesis under which this study was conducted was that the different kinds of ownership models for solar PV were treated in a measurably different way by the marketplace and thus resulted in different outcomes for the individuals who purchased these homes. The assumption for the creation of this dataset was that they would be able to quantitatively and qualitatively measure people’s experiences with pre-existing solar PV in the residential real estate market. In order to achieve this objective, they sampled solar housing real estate sales where the close of escrow occurred between January 1, 2014, through July 1, 2015. Surveys were sent out in August and September of 2015. The survey sampled households in single-family residential homes in Maricopa County, Arizona.