A home can have a brand new heat pump, quieter and cheaper to run than the system it replaced, and the listing will still say one word under “Heating”: Forced Air. The upgrade is real. The savings are real. But there is no good way for a standard listing to say so, which means the buyer never finds out.
That gap just got measured. New research from the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative, co-sponsored by Pearl, the home performance data company behind the Pearl SCORE™, analyzed 143 million U.S. real estate listings from 1995 to 2025. The finding: about one in four homes has at least one major energy or efficiency upgrade, but just over 8% of listings mention one.
For agents, that is not a small oversight. It means a large share of homes are being marketed on price, size, and finishes while the thing that actually determines what it costs to live there goes unmentioned.
What Buyers Cannot See, They Cannot Ask About
Buyers make offers based on what they can see: square footage, layout, curb appeal, photos of the kitchen. What they usually cannot see is how the home performs once they move in, meaning what it costs to heat and cool, how comfortable it stays through the seasons, and how well it holds up to weather.
“Buyers, sellers, and lenders transact based on what they can see. What they can’t see is how the home actually performs the job of being a home,” says Tim Stanislaus, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Pearl.
That blind spot shows up on every side of a transaction. Buyers have no easy way to compare what one home will cost to run against another. Sellers who paid for a better system get no credit for it at the closing table. And even when a listing does mention something like solar or a heat pump, most buyers have no framework for translating that into dollars or comfort, so it rarely changes their decision.
Why The Upgrades Disappear From Listings
This is not really anyone’s fault. Listing fields were built decades ago to capture what type of system a home has, not how well it performs or what it costs to operate. There was never a field for “cheaper to run” or “more comfortable in summer,” so agents have nowhere obvious to put that information.
The data backs this up in a simple way. When a home has solar panels, the listing mentions it about two out of three times, because solar sits on the roof where everyone can see it. When a home has a heat pump, the listing mentions it less than 10% of the time, because a heat pump is invisible from the curb. If a feature cannot be seen from the driveway, the listing usually does not talk about it.
Why This Matters More Now Than It Used To
A few trends are making this gap harder to ignore. The median first-time buyer is now 40 years old, according to the National Association of Realtors, and is often buying a home that is decades old with systems nearing the end of their life. At the same time, the average U.S. household spends about $2,200 a year on utilities, per the Department of Energy, and how a home performs has a direct effect on whether that number runs higher or lower.
Buyers are also asking more informed questions than they used to. “The everyday consumer is more educated today than they’ve ever been,” Stanislaus notes, and they increasingly expect real numbers instead of estimates from an agent.
There is a quieter piece of this too. A home’s original construction era, and the energy code it was built to, is one of the biggest factors in how it performs, yet that information hardly ever shows up on a listing either.
Closing The Gap With A Standard Rating
To address this, Pearl built performance profiles for all 97 million single family homes in the United States, using public records, utility data, and building characteristics. Every property gets a Pearl SCORE™, a rating on a 1 to 1,000 scale covering five areas: safety, comfort, operations, resilience, and energy. Homeowners can claim their property to add details or reflect upgrades they have made that affect these areas of focus.
“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.”
While a typical listing field only mentions “Forced Air,” a Pearl SCORE can show what that system actually means for a buyer’s monthly bills and day-to-day comfort, carrying information into the transaction that used to disappear entirely.
For agents, closing this gap early, before a buyer even tours the home, is one of the more straightforward ways to stand out in a crowded market. As older homes keep changing hands and utility costs keep climbing, how a home performs is becoming part of what it is worth, not just a footnote buried in the remarks section.
About Pearl: Founded in 2013, Pearl is a ratings and standards company building the national standard for home performance. Pearl SCORE™ rates every single-family home in the U.S. across five key pillars — Safety, Comfort, Operations, Resilience, and Energy — so home buyers, homeowners, and real estate professionals can understand how a home performs in daily life. As a Certified B Corporation, Pearl is accountable not only to its shareholders, but also to the homeowners and communities it serves. For more information, visit pearlscore.com.
This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
