CAAR REAL ESTATE WEEKLY WWW.CAAR.COM
FEATURE
OCTOBER 11- OCTOBER 17, 2017 ISSUE 26-41
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buyer doesn’t know it and the appraiser doesn’t know it. The appraiser is not a home inspector, so they’re not going through the house with a fine-tooth comb looking for things like that.” That’s where third party certification and real estate evaluation firms like Pearl Home Certification and Valucentric come in. “We provide services for real estate agents, contractors and home sellers,” Adams says. “From an appraisal perspective, for a high-performing house that is third-party certified, that certification is an asset unto itself. “The appraiser has to understand what the improvement is, and how it contributes to lowering operational costs. That’s essentially what we do. We have a third party certification for new and existing homes where an independent certifying contractor goes into the house and does a walk-through inspection. They take down important information tied to the house’s high-performing features, including model numbers and efficiency ratings, and then we assign points to the property based upon how much those features contribute to efficiency, comfort and air-quality and your house can achieve certification.” “What Pearl does for you is look at the window types, figure out which of your appliances are Energy Star certified, look into your insulation values, look at your HVAC,” Slater says. “Then
ment-sponsored enterprises out there except for the VA—require that an appraiser have what is called demonstrated competency for the type of property they’re doing. That means they’re not just familiar with it, but they’ve actually done one before.”
A Comfortable Home
they do a blower door test, pressurizing the home to measure how tight it is, how many times per hour the air in your home is naturally exchanged with fresh air just by the home breathing.” “Pearl certification is even more cost effective than solar panels,” Fincham says. “Homeowners get a significant savings on their bill when they go after those certifications.” Qualified appraisers like Fincham use third party scoring systems like the HERS Index (Home Energy Rating System) and the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating to document a home’s green features and energy efficiency. “A rating system helps the appraiser create a quantita-
tive comparison,” Fincham says. “It’s easier to extract the contributory value when there are reliable scores such as LEED, HERS and Pearl. We know that when scored with a reliable system there is merit to the upgrades.” Fincham calls LEED “one of the most substantial certifications you can get. But you generally don’t see that one on your everyday home, because it can be quite expensive to get.” “Where the rubber meets the road for consumers and agents is if you have a certified home you have to market it well,” Fincham says. That means making sure your REALTOR® insists on a competent appraiser. “Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, FHA—all the big govern-
As desirable and environmentally responsible as green upgrades are, homeowners should remember that only attic insulation and solar panels actually produce a positive return on one’s investment. But resale value is just the half of it. “There are tangible and comfort-driven reasons why people will be attracted to a house with improvements and it may not be tied to the fact that they want to save on energy bills,” Adams says. “Other things are important. Very few people approach a real estate agent and say I’m really interested in a house in this school district, this size and this [green rating]. But people do care very much about comfort.” “What inevitably happens when somebody makes these changes,” Slater says, “is that they are drawn to it for economic reasons. But that’s not what they talk about two months later. They talk about how much more they love their home because it’s comfortable. The changes become an intrinsic value that’s almost priceless.” n
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