1 in 4 U.S. Homes Has a Major Energy-Efficient System. Fewer Than 1 in 10 Listings Say So

Just 1 in 5 buyers found energy-efficiency details in the listings they considered.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, UNITED STATES, July 22, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- New consumer research finds that the details buyers need to judge what a home will cost to run are largely missing from the listings they rely on, according to a Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative study, co-sponsored by Pearl.

For homebuyers, energy efficiency shapes how comfortable a home is to live in and what it costs to run. Most say it matters to their decision. Yet the information they'd need to judge it is hard to find before they make an offer. That's among the central findings of Home Buying in the Energy Transition, a 2026 study of more than 1,000 recent homebuyers and over 1,500 real estate agents from the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC), co-sponsored by Pearl, the independent standards and ratings organization that rates how every single-family home in the country performs.

Buyers pay attention to how a home performs. In the study, 84% of recent buyers said energy efficiency was very or moderately important to their home-buying decision. Energy efficiency is a core metric of home performance. Without it, it's hard to tell how a home functions day-to-day, not just how it looks, and that's important to buyers.

That information is hard to come by. Only about 8% of 2025 listings mentioned energy efficiency at all, even though roughly 25% of U.S. homes now have at least one major energy-efficient asset. Just one in five buyers found energy-efficiency details in all the listings they considered, leaving many to weigh one of the largest purchases of their lives on little more than square footage and photos. And energy is only the most visible gap. How a home actually performs rarely shows up in a listing at all: what it costs to run, how comfortable and safe it is, how it handles storms and outages.

That gap is what Pearl aims to close. As a co-sponsor of the research, Pearl is named in the report as a resource for buyers seeking home-performance information. Its Pearl SCORE™ already rates every single-family home in the U.S. on a 1,000-point scale across five performance pillars: Safety, Comfort, Operations, Resilience, and Energy. Pearl SCORE rolls those pillars into one comparable rating that surfaces the hidden information a listing often leaves out, so buyers can weigh how a home performs while they're still choosing.

"This study confirms what buyers have told us for years: they're hungry for information about how a home actually performs, yet this information is hard to find during the home search," said Robin LeBaron, Co-founder and President at Pearl. "Buyers are interested in energy costs, and they're also very interested in health, comfort, and durability. Pearl exists to make home performance a central part of the home search itself — we make it clear to buyers how a home will perform up front, so they don’t have to learn about performance issues after they move in."

Buyers can look up any single-family home's Pearl SCORE at pearlscore.com.

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, we're accountable not only to our shareholders, but also to the homeowners and communities we serve. For more information, visit pearlscore.com.

Will Atkinson
Atkinson Strategic Communications
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