The subject of air quality has been prominent during the Covid19 pandemic. It is not a secret that good air quality and air renewal/filtering was helping a lot in reducing the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But what does it have to do with house hunting??

Have you ever searched for a house and wanted a really specific feature, like for instance central air? I bet you found this excercice pretty exhausting (at least in North America). Companies like Zillow will even go as far as tell you that central air will command $5486 USD more on average than a house without one. Yet, they will not provide a filter on their listing for you to focus on that criteria. This is becoming as important as ever now that filtered air plays such a important role in keeping us healthy. It’s not like retrofitting a building was a cheap operation. Central air runs large dock around the house (even more so if you have multiple zones) and will be really intrusive if thought out after the fact.

In “A New Way to Think About Air“, Sarah Zhang, goes as far as saying that we could even stop other airbornes viruses like the flu if we focused on procuring better air quality in buildings. After all, we have cured other pandemic by sanitizing other aspect of our lifes, like proper handling of sewage and sanitization of water. Why can’t we do the same for the air we breathe?