Most solar customers are first-time solar customers, so the whole process of purchasing a solar system can be pretty scary. They’ve bought a car before, they’ve bought a house before, but they’re in uncharted water with solar, so you need to look for every opportunity to make the purchase experience as simple and easy as possible - OpenSolar’s integrated finance feature helps you do just that!
Top Five States
Same as last month, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and California are topping the charts with the highest percentages of sales financed. Joining the ranks this month is New York, displacing New Jersey by a narrow margin.
Most Popular Product Type - and selling in a rising rate/inflationary environment
The 25 year 1.99% loan reigns supreme as the most popular product, but we’ve seen an increase in 25 year 2.99% loans. This is no surprise as solar loan fees increase in line with interest rates across the economy.
Homeowners have eyes and ears and know that interest rates are increasing everywhere, so a customer who may have been skeptical of a 2.99% rate 3 months ago is likely to be much more accepting today.
This is even more true given continued high levels of inflation. With energy prices increasing 20% year-over-year, the opportunity to save your customer money is even greater, even with a higher interest rate loan.
One thing to keep in mind is that interest rate increases have a bigger effect on longer loan terms: Increasing the interest rate from 1.99% to 2.99% increases the monthly payment on a 25 year loan by about 11.9% - on a 20 year loan it increases by 9.6% and on a 10 year loan by only 4.9%.
Finance vs Non-Financed System Prices
Once again, we saw significantly higher ticket sizes for financed projects. As more and more projects include storage or other secondary products, ticket sizes go up, and having an easy financing solution at your disposal will allow your customer to make the investment more easily.
Credit Application to Decision
As always, we saw customers move very quickly through the finance approval process on OpenSolar. In June, it took an average of only 6 minutes and 1 second to complete a solar credit application and an average of only 47 seconds for one of our finance partners to make a decision once the customer hit “Submit”. Less than 7 minutes to go from “Yeah, let’s do this!” to having a firm financing approval in hand.
Summary
Even as interest rates, finance continues to be a great tool to enable homeowners to say “yes” to solar, and OpenSolar’s integrated finance offerings make it as easy as possible for you to quote and close financing by keeping your rates and fees up to date on the back end and providing a simple, streamlined and intuitive application experience for your customer, embedded right in your proposal.
We’ll run the numbers each month and bring you insights on what we’re seeing. If your solar business is on OpenSolar, then we’re psyched to support you! But if you’re not yet using the integrated finance feature, we urge you to consider it as the next step of your journey on our platform. It’s delivering substantial benefits to those who are.
Happy selling!
Joe Abel
Head of Product