Receive comprehensive support to develop and launch successful energy disclosure policies.
Leverage best practices and technical guidance during policy design, stakeholder engagement, inspector training, and evaluation.
Why home energy disclosure?
Energy disclosure improves a city’s housing stock by encouraging investments in energy efficiency upgrades. Without disclosure policies, energy improvements are typically not disclosed when buying or selling a home. This makes it harder for homeowners to recoup the value of those investments at sale and for homebuyers to understand the value of those upgrades. With energy disclosure policies in place, sellers are more likely to be rewarded for investing in and highlighting energy efficiency improvements, and buyers are more likely to place importance on similar projects moving forward.
How we can help
CEE's team works with city officials to develop and launch successful energy disclosure policies by offering a workshop-based planning process and ongoing operations support. For cities of all sizes, we:
- Provide best practices and technical guidance during policy design
- Plan and facilitate stakeholder engagement
- Train and support home inspectors to gather energy data
- Process energy data from inspections into public reports
- Facilitate score transparency through websites and interactive maps
- Support consumer awareness through content creation and outreach efforts
- Collaborate with real estate associations to build energy disclosure visibility in the local market
- Evaluate energy data for quality assurance and program metrics
When to consider energy disclosure
In our experience, there are a handful of conditions that are favorable to pursuing energy disclosure. If your city has:
- Existing climate or energy goals
- Required time-of-sale inspection
- Older building stock
Energy disclosure may be a good opportunity to make progress toward energy goals while increasing the city's resilience and supporting homeowners. We've found that adding energy efficiency considerations to an existing process is the most cost-effective way to implement energy disclosure on a large scale, and that energy efficiency retrofits result in the biggest energy savings for the least cost when applied in buildings built before 1980.
We've already helped two of Minnesota's biggest cities.
The City of Minneapolis added energy disclosure to its Truth in Sale of Housing evaluation in January 2020. Today, more than 5,000 homes receive an energy disclosure report per year. The City of Bloomington added energy disclosure to its Time-of-Sale evaluation ordinance in April 2022, with more than 1,500 homes receiving energy disclosure reports per year today. Visit the program's website for homeowners and real estate agents.