Juan Fernandez, founder of CVF Homes, trained as an engineer before stumbling into homebuilding. He became a green-energy pioneer and is still going strong after two decades.
Andrew J. Whitaker/San Antonio Express-News
Juan Fernandez came to San Antonio from Mexico City at the turn of the century, intending to stay just long enough to settle some tax issues involving his father’s land. More than two decades later, he and his family remain, in part because they fell in love with the city and in part because he stumbled into a career as one of the city’s leading builders of energy-efficient homes.
His timing couldn’t have been better.
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This is one in a series of profiles the San Antonio Express-News will publish over the course of 2026 recognizing emerging leaders in business, science, politics, education, the arts and other fields.
To learn more about the series and to nominate people you think should be considered for profiles, go to Expressnews.com/20for26.
You can read previous stories in the series here.
With CPS Energy and the San Antonio Water System pursuing rate increases and people paying more for gasoline, groceries, health care and other essentials, Fernandez expects more buyers to recognize the value of the energy-saving features his company, CVF Homes, builds into every house.
“To me, it’s a no-brainer,” said Fernandez, 53, who founded CVF — for Casas Verdes Fernandez — in 2005. “These pressures, I mean, they’re not going away. I think the opposite, in fact. The more expensive water gets, the more expensive electricity gets, the more expensive everything gets, the more people are going to understand that the features we put into these homes will eventually pay for themselves.”
Many of the 50 homes CVF has built over the past two decades address this new reality with such energy-saving features as foam insulation, heat-pump water heaters, built-in EV chargers, variable-speed air conditioners, windows with low-emissivity (Low-E) glass coatings that reduce heat transfer, and smart water pumps that learn homeowners’ habits so they can send hot water to the shower in advance, reducing water waste.
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The company’s footprint is tiny compared with that of national home builders such as Lennar and KB Home, but its impact in San Antonio has been anything but negligible. CVF was ahead of the curve in bringing energy-saving features to residential construction in the city and in building homes in empty lots and other gaps in the urban fabric, an approach known as infill development.
“Juan is a visionary who is passionate about the community and has a knack for building homes that help improve people’s lives,” said Anita Ledbetter, executive director of Build San Antonio Green, a nonprofit that certifies environmentally friendly homes and buildings. “While he is one of the smaller builders we work with, he was one of the very first adopters of many of these technologies.”
CVF was the first builder working with Build San Antonio Green to construct a certified net zero residential home in San Antonio, meaning it produces as much renewable energy as it consumes. The company also helped pioneer the RioT system, which uses smart technology to monitor a home’s energy usage, indoor air quality and how hard its heating and cooling system must work to circulate air.
“Juan’s homes are, on average, about 33% more energy efficient than a brand new home built to code, according to the Home Energy Rating System,” Ledbetter said, referring to the nationally recognized scoring system used to measure a home’s energy efficiency.
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Since 2012, every CVF house has received certification from Build San Antonio Green. Many have also been certified by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program and the Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Home program, now known as Efficient New Homes.
Green Heights, a CVF development of 12 homes in Alamo Heights, won a 2018 award for best infill development from Build San Antonio Green and a 2019 Housing Innovation Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Fernandez estimates his homes cost 5% to 6% more than conventionally built houses — even more if purchasers opt for solar panels and a backup battery. Based on the nationwide average sales price of $475,000 for a new single-family home in June, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, that premium would amount to about $24,000 to $29,000.
But focusing on the upfront cost, he insists, is short-term thinking: He says homeowners can recover the additional cost in three to eight years, depending on the size of the house and whether it has solar panels and a battery.
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Jeanna Easley lived in one of CVF’s three-bedroom, 2½-bathroom houses in Green Heights for four years, until her job with Marathon Petroleum Corp. sent her to Houston in 2024.
With the petroleum industry under pressure to become greener, Easley said, she viewed the house as a statement that she was doing her part.
“I loved that house,” she said recently. “My (CPS Energy) bills were low, only about $100 a month, and I never had any temperature issues.”
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When it came time to sell the 2,400-square foot home, she quickly got an offer for $650,000, about $100,000 more than she’d paid.
“There was just a great allure to the house,” she said, citing its vaulted ceiling, ground-floor primary bedroom, outdoor patio and sealed concrete floors.
She also lauded Fernandez for his follow-through after she bought the house in 2020.
“A lot of builders disappear once you sign the papers,” she said. “But Juan was always super helpful and accessible. He was in the neighborhood all the time, asking, ‘Do you need anything?’ ”
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Mexico City to San Antonio
Building houses was not part of Fernandez’s original life plan.
He grew up on his grandfather’s dairy farm in Ixtapaluca, Mexico, about an hour’s drive east of Mexico City.
“My father and uncles ran the farm, but I soon realized I had no interest in the dairy business,” he said with a chuckle.
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Juan Fernandez, founder of CVF Homes, trained as an engineer before stumbling into homebuilding. He became a green-energy pioneer and is still going strong after two decades.
Andrew J. Whitaker/San Antonio Express-News
So he left home to study mechanical engineering at Tecnológico de Monterrey, a private research university commonly known as Tec de Monterrey.
After graduating, he moved to Mexico City, where he worked as an engineer at one of the country’s largest insurance companies and, later, bought the city’s first franchise of the Farmacias del Ahorro drugstore chain.
This was in 1999 and, although the shop was located near a busy subway station, competition from other drugstores was fierce, making it hard for him to make ends meet. He eventually sold the store back to the company, then convinced his dad to let him go to San Antonio to oversee some land his father and a friend had invested in on the city’s South Side.
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He quickly discovered the friend hadn’t been paying property taxes and that there was a lien on the land. Fernandez offered to move to San Antonio for a year, sell the land and settle the debt.
“Twenty-three years later, married and with three kids, I’m still here,” he said.
He and his wife, artist and writer Regina Moya, quickly fell in love with San Antonio.
“The city represented an opportunity,” he said. “It’s a growing city with a dynamic economy. Beyond that, it’s a very welcoming place. We have lots of friends who are originally from Mexico, so that’s very welcoming, too.”
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Coming from the urban sprawl of Mexico City, they were delighted to occasionally see deer running through their North Side yard.
Not long after arriving, Fernandez took some of the money from the drugstore sale and bought a small house in the Lavaca neighborhood south of downtown to renovate and sell.
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“It’s funny, because I knew nothing about construction,” he said. “I relied on people I met to teach me.”
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The refurbished house sold quickly and for a profit. So over the next few years, he renovated and sold several more, confining himself mostly to the Lavaca, King William and Lone Star neighborhoods.
“We’d completely gut the houses, install new plumbing, new wiring, everything,” he said. “We fixed them up so they were really cool. I’d never considered getting into construction but, by trial and error, I found that I liked it and was good at it.”
Although his lack of a track record initially made things difficult, Fernandez quickly built connections in the business community. San Antonio’s close ties to Mexico helped ease his transition.
“My accent wasn’t as foreign here as it might have been somewhere else in the country,” he said. “San Antonio is a very bicultural city so that helped in a big way.”
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Building green
Eventually, Fernandez bought a house on a lot large enough to subdivide, so he decided to build his first completely new property.
Not that he had any experience with this type of building. Fortunately, he had neighbors who did.
“I was leasing a tiny office on Broadway, next to Build San Antonio Green,” he said. “When they told me what they did, how they promoted green building, I said, ‘This completely makes sense.’ After that, I was all in and decided to make the house as eco-friendly as possible.”
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Ledbetter has since worked with Fernandez on many other projects, watching him develop his expertise while also promoting green building to the broader home building community.
“He’s always been willing to share his knowledge with others,” she said.
She recalls a house CVF was renovating during a Build San Antonio Green home tour in Lavaca several years ago. Another builder working down the street kept returning to Fernandez’s job site to figure out what he was doing. Fernandez eventually explained his methods to the builder.
“We ended up certifying that builder’s house, too,” Ledbetter said.
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Real estate agent Craig Browning, who has helped sell several CVF projects, says Fernandez is ahead of the curve when it comes to building energy-efficient homes in San Antonio.
“What he does is more common in cities like Austin, but I love that he’s taking that approach to San Antonio,” said Browning, who has been an agent with the Phyllis Browning Company for 16 years. “Buyers increasingly want to know about heating and cooling costs, water usage and the like. Juan’s homes address those concerns perfectly.”
Browning points to Fernandez’s use of heat pump water heaters as an example of this forward thinking.
This type of water heater acts like an air conditioner in reverse, pulling heat from the surrounding air and transferring it to the water in a reservoir, saving up to 60% on energy bills.
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“Tankless is good,” Browning said, “but Juan stepped up to the next, better technology, the heat pump.”
Unlike large-scale homebuilders such as Lennar, which reported delivering more than 82,000 homes nationwide in 2025, CVF is a small operation with three full-time employees. It builds three to 10 homes a year, depending on the state of the economy, and most of them are built on vacant or underutilized lots.
One example is Victoria Commons, located on land south of downtown formerly occupied by low-income housing. It was designed in part by those responsible for Austin’s master-planned Mueller neighborhood, and it has many of the same new urbanism attributes: high-density, diverse housing, proximity to jobs and retail, and robust public spaces. CVF Homes is one of only two approved developers for the neighborhood, a revitalization project led by Opportunity Home San Antonio.
In recent years, CVF has ventured into tony neighborhoods such as Alamo Heights and Terrell Hills. And Fernandez recently signed a contract to do a major renovation of a 1980s house in the Dominion.
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Fernandez says convincing potential buyers they’ll come out ahead in the long run remains a challenge. So, he runs the numbers for them.
He currently has a house on the market for $729,000 that he says would be priced in the high $600,000s without the energy-saving bells and whistles. The house is unoccupied, but even with the air conditioning running and the lights on full time, the home’s April CPS Energy usage bill was zero.
Fernandez argues that as energy-efficient products become more popular, the price difference will narrow.
“It’s the same as with any new technology,” he said. “When they’re new, they’re more expensive. But as demand increases, prices drop, making them more affordable.”
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Fernandez has five jobs in the pipeline: the Dominion house renovation; two new builds in Victoria Commons, across from the planned Project Marvel site; and one home each in Terrell Hills and the Northwood neighborhood, east of San Antonio International Airport.
“In the end, you get a house that’s built better, uses fewer resources and lasts longer,” he said. “You’ll enjoy living in it more, too.”