Earth Advantage®, Inc. announced today that the available performance data from the
Green Building Registry® (GBR) has exceeded three million records.
Historically, important information on a home such as energy ratings, third-party building certifications, or solar electricity generation has not been included in for-sale or rental listings. Without access to this data, buyers lack the information needed to make a fully informed purchasing decision. This lack of data transparency has also made it difficult for appraisers and lending institutions to create thorough valuations that include a home’s energy performance. As a result, thousands of dollars of value per home are potentially left on the table.
Thanks to the growth in GBR records, more people have access to reliable home performance data and can factor that into their purchase decision. More data provides a compelling reason for the real estate market —including property databases, multiple listing services, brokerages, and the appraisal and finance sectors— to partner with GBR to automate use of this data within the real estate transaction. Affordability continues to be a concern, and having insight to a home’s estimated annual energy costs and total cost of ownership, or knowing that the property was built to be more energy efficient, is increasingly more important to a large pool of buyers.
Since 2017, Earth Advantage’s self-funded Green Building Registry has provided home performance data to the public and real estate multiple listing services. GBR partners directly with programs to provide verified data directly from sources such as the U.S. Department of Energy’s Home Energy Score program, LEED® for Homes, ENERGY STAR®, HERS® Index Scores, and other national and regional third-party verification programs. There are currently twenty different national and regional building certification and energy rating programs that partner with GBR to make their data easily available to the market.
For a certification or energy rating program’s data to be included in the Green Building Registry, the program must have the correct permissions for its data to be made available publicly. The data must also pass quality control standards set forth by the respective program, be available electronically from a central database, and be recorded at the property address level. These are some of the factors contributing to the volume of data available for use in this first-of-its-kind, single source of open data building performance data in the US.
David Heslam, executive director at Earth Advantage, stated, “Three million records in GBR is an important milestone that represents the efforts of many partner organizations. Looking forward, as more homes are built to high efficiency levels and many others get retrofitted, we foresee the data from over a million homes a year being shared by our partners through the GBR. ”
About the Green Building Registry
The Green Building Registry (GBR) is the largest single source of building performance data in the United States. GBR contains over three million records containing data on single-family, multifamily, and commercial buildings. Our GBR-API allows any MLS, lender, or other data provider to connect directly to the information contained in the registry. Visit the GBR website, us.greenbuildingregistry.com for a free property search.
GBR is a
wholly owned and self-funded initiative of Earth Advantage, a nonprofit organization helping to advance a more informed and humane housing market that recognizes the elements of homes that create climate risk and values the characteristics of homes that provide climate solutions. Earth Advantage partners with entities across the country to develop tangible, systemic solutions for climate-friendly housing. For more information visit
www.earthadvantage.org
If you would like more information about this topic, please call Meg Garabrant at 503.310.9138 x162, or email
meg@greenbuildingregistry.com
