*LIFESTYLE HOMES NEWS UPDATE

If you visit the Town of Harmony, you may notice LifeStyle Homes’ sales specialist, Bonnie Oliver, buzzing around the community on a shiny red electric golf cart.

While there is nothing unusual about an electric golf cart, what makes this particular one special is the fact that it is virtually running on sunshine! You see, the golf cart’s battery is charged inside the garage of our solar-powered model home in Harmony. Because the home garners its energy from the sun, essentially the golf cart’s fuel is sunshine. Pretty cool, right?

We realize that our zero-emissions battery-charged golf cart is an early edition of what’s to come in the world of electric vehicles, but it is a start.

The next step for us at LifeStyle Homes is to demonstrate to our homebuyers how our solar-powered homes can produce enough energy to not only power their households, but their future electric cars, too. In other words, we will demonstrate how our solar-powered homes can produce so much energy that our homebuyers can rid their lives of monthly energy bills, as well as gasoline expenses.

At this point in time, there are approximately 15 plug-in cars available throughout the nation, with several new models to be released soon. Two that we like are the Fiat 500e and the Tesla Model X. We have plans to purchase one of each of these electric vehicles when they are made available locally.

Our efforts to help foster the clean-energy are being complemented by new clean-energy initiatives popping up all over Central Florida.

Harmony, for example, is a town committed to sustainable living. In fact, Harmony is one of first communities to offer dedicated electric-car charging stations near its town center.

Nearby Orlando has its own electric-vehicle plan, as well. According to Drive Electric Orlando – a newly launched program that encourages the area’s 57 million annual visitors to rent electric vehicles when they’re traveling here – metro Orlando has built one of the largest charging networks in the country with more than 300 charging stations available.

And Central Florida as a whole, including Brevard County, is home to one of the Department of Energy’s 100 Clean Cities Coalitions. The primary goal of Clean Cities is to reduce petroleum use in the U.S. by 2.5 billion gallons in 2020 through renewable and alternative fuels. In fact, in 2011 alone, Clean Cities successfully helped avert more than 5.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

If you’re wondering why all this information on electric vehicles is relevant to LifeStyle home buyers, allow us to explain.

We at LifeStyle believe clean energies will soon forever change the world we live in. And with nearly 25 self-sustaining solar-powered homes under our belts, we’ve already demonstrated the game-changing power of solar energy as it relates to household energy consumption. Today, with our confidence at an all-time high, we’re ready to move to the next level.