National Home Performance Data Reveals a Major Gap in Real Estate Valuations

Written by:

Rudi Davis

Date:

14 Nov 2025

Share

Share via Facebook

Share via Linkedin

Share via X

Copy to clipboard

For decades, the real estate industry has relied on incomplete information when assessing properties, according to Tim Stanislaus, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Pearl. In a recent interview, Stanislaus highlighted a critical gap: while buyers, sellers, and lenders focus on a home’s appearance, location, and features, they routinely overlook how the home actually functions in terms of safety, comfort, and cost.

“Home buyers, home sellers, and lenders have been transacting based on what they can see about a home, its price, size, location, layout, curb appeal, and features,” Stanislaus said. “But what they can’t see is how the home actually performs the job of being a home: protecting health and safety, maintaining comfort, controlling operating costs, withstanding extreme weather, and managing energy.”

This oversight means that while cosmetic upgrades like countertops and decks frequently headline listings, core performance metrics that affect homeowner expenses and resilience remain hidden from market participants.

To address this issue, Pearl developed a rating system called the SCORE framework, which stands for Safety, Comfort, Operations, Resilience, and Energy. The Pearl Score rates homes on a scale from one to 1,000, summarizing complex building science data into a single, understandable number for real estate professionals and consumers.

“Pearl is the translator between experts and homeowners, and Pearl Score is the language that makes that translation possible,” Stanislaus said. For years, building performance was measured using technical terms like BTUs, R-values, and SEER ratings, which are largely inaccessible to most consumers and agents.

This week, Pearl launched the first public home performance registry, profiling all 92 million single-family homes in the United States. The registry, available at PearlScore.com, allows anyone to look up a property’s performance rating by entering its address. According to Stanislaus, this is the most comprehensive effort to date to address the industry’s lack of visibility into home performance.

“We’ve completed the first-ever home performance profile of all 92 million US single-family homes, and we’ve compiled them into a searchable Public Registry,” Stanislaus said. Now, homeowners and buyers can see how a property actually performs, not just how it looks.

The registry does more than assign scores; it gives homeowners the ability to claim their property and update any missing or incorrect data, much like reviewing and correcting a credit report. This enables homeowners to ensure their property’s profile accurately reflects improvements or upgrades that could impact value and insurability.

“You can think of this as being very analogous to a FICO credit rating score for a consumer,” Stanislaus said. Just as credit scores affect borrowing terms and insurance rates, a home’s performance profile now has the potential to influence property values, insurance premiums, and loan decisions.

The registry’s launch comes as housing affordability is near historic lows, mortgage rates remain high, and insurance premiums have surged by up to 30% in some states. These pressures make transparent home performance data essential for buyers and sellers seeking to make informed decisions.

“Efficient, well-maintained homes are cheaper to operate and insure, and they’re more resilient to climate and energy shocks,” Stanislaus said. “But until now, that performance has largely been invisible.”

Pearl’s registry aims to bring transparency to real estate transactions, giving buyers, sellers, and lenders critical information that has long been missing from the process. By making home performance data accessible and actionable, the registry could change how properties are valued, marketed, and purchased across the housing market.