RESNET and Earth Advantage are excited to announce a joint initiative to make it easier to buy a HERS® rated energy efficient home in the Portland, Oregon housing market. RESNET and Earth Advantage have agreed to work together to pilot the auto-population of HERS® Index Scores into the Portland, Oregon metro area Regional Multiple Listing Service (RMLS). The HERS® Index is the national standard by which a home’s energy efficiency is rated; where a lower score means a more efficient home. In 2017, RESNET eclipsed two million homes being HERS® rated. The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is used by the real estate industry to list and value homes for sale. Over the past decade, Multiple Listing Services (MLS) across the country have taken steps to provide fields for green and energy efficient home features in real estate listings. A number of MLSs across the nation have a space to add a HERS® Index Score in a home’s listing. However, most of the data must be entered manually by the listing agent, which has limited the use of these fields in many markets. By working with Earth Advantage, RESNET will pilot a process for auto-populating HERS® Index Scores into real estate listings. Providing a home’s HERS® Index Score in the real estate listing allows prospective homebuyers to better understand its level of energy efficiency. “RESNET is excited about this joint initiative with Earth Advantage and look forward to expanding auto-population of HERS® Index Scores to MLSs across the country” remarked Steve Baden, Executive Director of RESNET. In 2017, Earth Advantage became the first organization to auto-populate an MLS listing with energy efficiency data through their Green Building Registry™ platform. Earth Advantage developed the Green Building Registry with the express purpose of providing a software solution for ensuring verified, public, green home and energy efficiency data could be captured on MLSs at time of sale. With the click of a button, listing agents can pull data from the Green Building Registry in real-time using its proprietary API. David Heslam, Executive Director at Earth Advantage commented; “We hope this is just the beginning of a partnership to successfully move RESNET’s data on over two million homes nationwide into MLSs, starting with our pilot in Portland.” Earth Advantage is a Portland, Oregon based nonprofit whose mission is to advance the value of sustainable building practices in the Northwest residential market. They are a leader in delivering certification, training, research, and software development in Oregon and across the U.S. They are dedicated to providing leadership and guidance to the building industry in order to hasten the arrival of zero energy building standards by 2030.
