Asking a seller how much they pay for utilities feels like a reasonable question before making an offer on a home. The problem is that the answer rarely tells a buyer much about how the home itself performs.
— Asking a seller how much they pay for utilities feels like a reasonable question before making an offer on a home. The problem is that the answer rarely tells a buyer much about how the home itself performs.
According to Tim Stanislaus, SVP of Business Development at Pearl, a national home performance data company, the number a seller reports is shaped almost entirely by how that household lives, not by the house itself. “The actual utility bills from the owner are going to be biased based on the occupant load and the occupant behavior in that house,” Stanislaus said. “So I have six people living in the home, and three of them like to take 30-minute showers every day. That may not be the experience I’m going to have in the home.”
Why Seller Bills Are Not a Reliable Benchmark
A household of two retirees who work from home will use energy very differently than a family of five with teenagers. Neither number says much about whether the home itself is efficient. A seller’s utility bill reflects habits as much as it reflects the building, which makes it a poor tool for comparing homes against each other.
Calling the utility company directly runs into a similar issue. It can confirm what a specific household actually paid, but it still cannot separate the behavior of the people living there from the performance of the house itself.
A Better Way to Compare Homes
What buyers actually need, according to Stanislaus, is a normalized number, one that holds behavior constant and measures how efficient the home is on its own. He compared it to the miles per gallon rating on a car. “Miles per gallon can really vary depending on how you drive, where you drive,” he said. “So you need to have a normalized apples to apples number to be able to understand: if everything was held constant, how efficient would this home be versus that home?”
This is the gap Pearl SCORE is designed to fill. Rather than relying on one household’s bill history, it evaluates the home’s energy profile directly, giving buyers a consistent way to compare properties that might look similar on paper but perform very differently in practice. More detail on how that scoring works is available through Pearl SCORE.
What This Means Before You Make an Offer
For buyers trying to budget accurately, the practical step is to look past a seller’s self-reported bills and toward data that isolates the home’s actual efficiency. Two houses in the same neighborhood, built the same year, at the same price, can carry very different real costs to operate depending on how well their systems were built and maintained.
Before submitting an offer, it is worth asking not just what the current owner pays, but what an efficiency-focused, normalized comparison shows about the home itself. That distinction can prevent a costly surprise a few months after moving in.
Pearl is a ratings and standards company that built the national standard for home performance. Pearl SCORE™ rates every single-family home in the U.S. on a 1-to-1,000 point scale across five key elements pillars – Safety, Comfort, Operations, Resilience, and Energy – so buyers, sellers, and real estate professionals can understand how a home performs in daily life.
This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.
Contact Info:
Name: Katherine Cahill
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Organization: Pearl
Website: https://pearlscore.com/
Release ID: 89201917
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