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Picture a home with a brand-new heat pump — quieter, more efficient, and cheaper to run than the system it replaced. Now picture its listing. Under "Heating," it says one word: "Forced Air."
The upgrade is real. The value is real. But the way real estate describes homes has no good way to say so — so the story never reaches the buyer.
For years this was hard to prove. Now it isn't. New research from the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC) — a study Pearl co-sponsored — analyzed 143 million U.S. real estate listings from 1995 to 2025, working with the intelligence platform 257. The finding is stark: about one in four U.S. homes has at least one major energy or efficiency asset, but just over 8% of listings mention one.
The real estate industry has long had a blind spot: we can tell buyers everything about the countertops and almost nothing about how the home actually performs — what it costs to run, how comfortable it is, how well it holds up. For agents who close that gap early, it's one of the clearest ways to stand out since the MLS went online.
"Buyers, sellers, and lenders transact based on what they can see — price, size, location, layout, curb appeal," says Tim Stanislaus, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Pearl. "What they can't see is how the home actually performs the job of being a home."
That asymmetry shows up on every side of the deal:
This isn't anyone's fault — it's how the system was built. Listing fields were designed to capture what kind of system a home has ("Central," "Forced Air"), not how it could impact its occupants or what it costs to run.
The proof is in what gets mentioned. When a home has solar, the listing notes it about two-thirds of the time — solar sits on the roof, in plain view. When a home has a heat pump, the listing notes it under 10% of the time — a heat pump is invisible from the driveway. If a feature can't be seen from the curb, the market mostly doesn't talk about it. Geography follows the same logic: solar shows up in listings across Hawaii and California, heat pumps in Maine and the Pacific Northwest — but even the top states leave most of the story untold.
Several forces make this gap harder to ignore:
There's a quieter version of the same problem built into the homes themselves: a home's original construction era — and the energy code it was built to — is among the biggest determinants of how it performs, yet neither ever appears on a listing.
Building scientists have long measured performance in units most buyers never see — R-values, SEER ratings, air changes per hour. The Pearl SCORE™ translates those into one comparable rating across five dimensions:
Safety — protection from indoor air hazards like radon, mold, and carbon monoxide.
Comfort — consistent temperatures, humidity control, and how well the home holds conditions season to season.
Operations — the true cost of ownership: utilities, maintenance, and equipment efficiency.
Resilience — how the home stands up to extreme weather: drainage, roofing, foundation, and windows.
Energy — modern systems and grid independence, from smart panels to battery storage to EV-charging readiness.
In November 2025, Pearl did something that had never been done: it built performance profiles for all 97 million single-family homes in the United States. The Pearl Home Performance Registry™, at pearlscore.com, gives every property a Pearl SCORE™ on a 1-to-1,000 scale. It's compiled from public records, utility information, and building characteristics, so a home's profile exists whether or not the current owner has ever filled anything out. Homeowners can claim a property to add additional detail and reflect improvements they’ve made.
"For decades, homebuyers have been expected to make six-figure decisions with almost no data about how a home performs," says Cynthia Adams, CEO of Pearl. "Every party in a transaction is deciding with incomplete information about the single largest investment most people will ever make."
Where a listing field says "Forced Air," Pearl could show what the home actually has and what it means for the next owner — carrying the full picture of what it could be like to live in that home into the transaction.
Q: What did the SECC study find?
A: Analyzing 143 million U.S. listings from 1995 to 2025, it found that about one in four homes has at least one major energy or efficiency asset, while just over 8% of listings mention one — a wide gap between what's in homes and what listings say.
Q: Why don't listings capture how a home performs?
A: Listing fields were built to describe the type of system a home has, not its quality or what it costs to run. With hundreds of local listing services and little agent training on newer fields, performance details usually end up in free-text remarks, if they appear at all.
Q: What is the Pearl SCORE™?
A: A standardized 1-to-1,000 rating of how a home performs across five dimensions — safety, comfort, operations, resilience, and energy — searchable by address at pearlscore.com. It's compiled from public records, utility, and building data; homeowners can claim a property to add detail.
