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Listing service will note green homes

Real estate – The region’s top source on house sales adds the category to help buyers

Thursday, September 07, 2006

DYLAN RIVERA

Portland-area appraisers and real estate agents soon will be able to search for new homes that have met national standards for earth-friendly construction, an increasingly sought-after feature in the local housing market.

The Regional Multiple Listing Service, the region’s most authoritative source of information on home sales, has quietly decided to incorporate the leading green building programs in its listings starting early next year.

The green building data will enable real estate professionals to search for houses that have met green building standards as easily as they search for houses for sale by high school or ZIP code. The RMLS’ recent decision makes Portland the first — and likely the largest — metropolitan area where a real estate listing service will make green building information available as part of standard search capabilities.

Green building groups called the new search ability a testament to Portland’s status as a leader in environmentally friendly practices in home construction and commercial buildings. It shows the rising popularity of energy efficiency standards, they said, and could help promote awareness and higher property values for homes that have such qualities.

“People increasingly want energy efficiency in their homes, indoor air quality and lower energy bills,” said Terry Miller, green building manager for the city of Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development. “This gives them the ability to find those features and a mainstream tool, which is important.”

Proposed last year, too

The action reflects the persistence and effectiveness of some local green building interest groups and real estate agent Kria Lacher of Meadows Group Realtors Inc., who drafted the proposal. It shows how a traditionally conservative sector of the local business community is embracing what not long ago was a fringe market for houses built to reduce production of greenhouse gases and overall energy consumption.

Lacher had proposed some of the changes last year, but made her proposal too late for the committee to consider it, said George Perkins, who chaired the committee this year and in 2005.

When the committee saw her proposals this year, members agreed that they seemed to hit on a growing trend that home buyers and real estate agents are interested in, said Perkins, contacted this week on vacation in Canada. The committee recommended it with few changes, he said.

“Energy efficiency and green is important to most people now,” he said. “Conservation, being good stewards of what we have. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in our industry that doesn’t think it’s important.”

All of the search criteria will be restricted to real estate agents, appraisers and other professional members of the RMLS.

The new policy will mostly affect new homes, which will be searchable by the names of well-known third-party inspection programs. Other environmentally-friendly amenities added to existing homes, will be searchable individually, such as on-site solar power or high-efficiency furnaces.

Lacher said the changes will help low- to middle-income home buyers, who can stand to gain the most from energy cost savings.

“My belief is on the lower end, this is really going to help those buyers and sellers,” Lacher said. “If we do have an energy crisis, those are the ones that are going to get hurt by it.”

The change will begin to help builders and homeowners realize the value energy efficient homes add, said Sean Penrith, executive director of Earth Advantage Inc., a leading green building certification program. It will allow agents and appraisers to compare groups of properties with and without energy efficiency standards to see how they affect sales prices. This could encourage lenders to give bigger loans to borrowers with efficient houses, with the understanding that the borrower can afford a higher mortgage because of paying lower energy bills.

Pull-down menu

The new search form will allow real estate agents helping a home seller to describe the property’s green qualities with more ease and precision than before. A key feature will allow agents to select a green building certification program from a pull-down menu that has a list of four programs to choose from. Each of the certification programs are nationally known and feature third-party certification.

The programs include those implemented by Earth Advantage, a Portland-based spinoff of Portland General Electric; Energy Star, an energy efficiency program designed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency; and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for homes, run by the U.S. Green Building Council.

In addition, agents will be able to check off some home features that can contribute to energy efficiency and ecological design. Some of those features include whether the house has a high-efficiency furnace, cork or bamboo flooring and partial solar power.

Real estate agents, including Lacher, said the current database requires agents to search a free-form comment field, where agents can list features not listed in the main form. But a search for “green,” for example, might turn up houses that mention nearby green space or green color in decorations, among other unrelated items.

February start date

The revision came about from a relatively mundane annual review by the RMLS board of its database. A committee of the board convenes each year to discuss changes to the forms that real estate agents use to describe properties they are listing for sale.

The full RMLS board approved the proposal with no changes a few weeks ago, Perkins said. The new policy will be implemented by February, as the RMLS staff implement several wide ranging software changes, he said.

The RMLS committee rejected Lacher’s call to have the certification programs tagged to existing homes as well as new construction. Perkins said the committee was concerned that homeowners might not keep up with the features that make a home efficient.

“We know when the builder builds it, it will be certified and everything will be right,” Perkins said. “But after the homeowner has had it for two or three years, it hard to tell if they’ve done something that makes it disqualify for the certification.”

Dylan Rivera: 503-221-8532; dylanrivera@news.oregonian.com

Sustain lane    http://karlenzig.typepad.com/karlenzig/2006/09/portland_first_.html

Green clips 2006  http://www.greenclips.com/06issues/289.htm

Mail tribune 2008 http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080229/LIFE/802290327/-1/HOMELIFE07

RMLS press http://www.rmlsbenefits.com/App_Themes/RMLSbenefitsTheme/PDF/Press/RMLS%20Marks%20One%20Year%20of%20Green%20Listings.pdf

http://www.fypower.org/news/?p=397

NWMLS http://greenworksrealty.com/e-cert_report/E-cert_additions_to_MLS.pdf

Bikeable oregonian article http://www.oregonlive.com/cycling/index.ssf/2008/08/some_home_buyers_new_musthave.html

In Realtor magazine http://www.realtor.org/eomag.nsf/pages/GreenMLS

Even in canada http://www.sustainablebuildingcentre.com/forum-topic/is_there_a_market_in_bc_for_building_sustainable_homes