Pittsburgh should promote energy-efficient homes
The West Penn Multi-List should catch up with the times and let homeowners and buyers easily search for houses with green features, writes engineer/ advocate LUCYNA DE BARBARO
When selling your house, you want to highlight its best features. If you added insulation, bought Energy Star appliances or installed energy-efficient windows or solar panels, you want potential buyers to know that. Likewise, when shopping for a new home, you’d like to know if a house is energy efficient (and therefore has lower utility bills) and if it was constructed with non-polluting building materials.
In most places in the United States, the Multi-List Service (MLS) database lets buyers and sellers search for homes based on energy efficiency and other green features. But not the West Penn Multi-List. Here in Western Pennsylvania, you can search for homes with swimming pools but not for those with attributes that will reduce your heating and cooling bills and do less damage to the environment.
I hope to see this change soon. Pittsburgh is going green, and reforming the MLS would be a significant step forward.
The visibility of energy efficiency upgrades in the real-estate market would help homeowners see how to more quickly recoup their investments. It also would stimulate the transition from leaky and energy-wasting housing and give people market incentives to buy healthier and more environmentally protective homes.
My husband and I care very much about the environment, the future and our city, so when we built our house, we put our values into action. We recently completed construction of an energy-efficient, “passive-house” duplex in Squirrel Hill. (A passive house has minimal impact on the environment.)
Our 2,890-square-foot home can be heated and cooled for $35 per
month, on average. The house earned certification from Energy Star and Passive House Institute, and it was labeled Gold by the National Green Building Standard. We chose building materials that offered the highest standard for indoor air quality, and we put in sustainable landscaping.
When it was time to offer the other half of the duplex for sale, we discovered to our dismay that there was no way to include such information, such as energyefficiency ratings or certifications, as searchable fields in the West Penn Multi-List. Potential buyers looking for these qualities in a new home get no help from the MLS database.
Even worse, when it came time to assess the value of our property, we were unable to pull out homes with these types of characteristics for comparison. According to the National Association of Realtors, new houses designated Energy Star often sell for 9 percent to 14 percent more than equivalent homes without that designation. But, again, these homes cannot be located with an MLS search in Western Pennsylvania.
On the other side of home sales, buyers can receive larger mortgages for energyefficient homes due to their reduced operating costs. But in Western Pennsylvania, without easily available market data on comparable houses, lenders are unwilling to account for the increased value of a green home. This results in lost opportunities for homeowners to recoup the value of building improvements and for quantifying their market impact. When homesellers put money and effort into making their homes more energy efficient, they deserve support.
A 2015 Dodge Data & Analytics survey of 232 builders and remodelers from across the United States demonstrated that green construction and green remodeling are a fast-growing segment of the housing market. By 2020, 51 percent of home builders and 36 percent of remodelers expect to complete 60 percent or more of their projects according to greenbuilding principles. A study by the National Association of Home Builders found that the Energy Star for New Homes label was ranked “very important” by 91 percent of new homebuyers, putting it in the top five “must haves” among 120 features.
This is not surprising: People prefer homes that do not waste energy and money. They like homes that are free of drafts and of indoor air pollution produced by materials that emit hazardous chemicals. Some buyers also prefer solar panels. Currently, this information can be included in the West Penn Multi-List, but you cannot search on it to easily find homes with these features.
More efficient homes, when clearly distinguished from other homes, also sell faster. This is a win-win for sellers and real-estate professionals.
At a recent event titled “Stepping Up: Putting Energy and Green into Home Listings,” I heard that reforming the MLS has been pursued by ReEnergize Pittsburgh, a coalition that includes municipal governments and some environmental and community organizations. But the owners of West Penn Multi-List apparently have rebuffed ReEnergize Pittsburgh. They likely won’t consider searchable green fields in their listings unless consumers raise their voices. Let’s do.