September 2010

Homes

Greening the MLS

By Glen Girard, USGBC CO Communications Chair

How can you measure the value of 'green' when appraising a home? Thanks to Sean Smith, the Colorado Chapter's Residential Green Building Advocate, Colorado appraisers will soon have the tools to help answer this longstanding question.

A multidisciplinary team including Contractors, Energy Efficiency professionals, Realtors, Appraisers, Lenders, and two of Colorado's largest multi-list services have launched an initiative with the Governor's Energy Office (GEO). The effort has resulted in a recommended list of green building and energy efficiency identifiers for the residential market. The list of searchable fields was provided to the state's 18 independently owned and operated MLS providers, who are encouraged to incorporate the fields into their systems.

The fields are divided into two categories, 'Certifications' and 'Features'. Certifications are third party verified programs such as LEED for Homes, HERS Rating, ENERGY STAR, and NAHBINGBS-ICC 700. Features will focus on renewable energy such as Solar PV and Solar Thermal. Additionally, homeowners and realtors will also have the ability to showcase other green attributes in an addendum field. This allows for a catchall of information that homeowners and Realtors can utilize to showcase a home's unique features such as no-VOC paint or recycled content cabinets.

As the Chair of the Residential Energy Efficiency Working Group's Appraisal subcommittee and a homebuilder of high-quality green homes, with cutting-edge, ecofriendly amenities, Smith understands the solution to proper home valuation is data.

"Providing the Real Estate industry with data specific to a home's green attributes will assist in building industry awareness and a verifiable system to quantify the impact of green home attributes. We believe Colorado has found a viable, long term solution to the problem of valuing green construction, and the model is most certainly repeatable. The goal is to make it as easy to find a LEED certified home as it is to find a three bedroom home. This not only means appraisers can find them easily, it also allows sellers to showcase their homes and buyers to be more selective. With the available fields, a buyer can move to a new city and only look at homes that are ENERGY STAR certified. If the MLS does not include this information, there is no efficient way to perform this type of search," Smith said.

The initiative is another example of how collaboration is working in the green building
industry. Having searchable fields will make it easy for buyers, appaisers, and lenders to
review a home's green building attributes, as well as providing sellers the ability to
differentiate the property by listing the green investments they have made in the home.
As an example, appraisers will no longer need to sort through multiple documents
detailing all the green aspects of a home. Now they can look at these designations on the
MLS. An appraiser doesn't need to figure out what increased insulation means to the bottom line when they have a LEED for Homes Gold designation and a HERS rating in
front of them as a justification. It is understood this will not be an overnight solution, but
as the database grows with the sale of each green home, more tangible data will be
available for the appraisers and lenders.

Implementation of the green searchable fields has started at IRES, the MLS which covers
Boulder, Fort Collins, and Greeley, Longmont, and LovelandlBerthoud. Other MLS
services in the state, such as Metro List, are also starting to integrate the fields in their
systems as well.