The Energizer

Vol. 2


Assessors in Action

A quick glance at the Home Energy Score Home Inspectors who are makin’ it work!

Inspector

Zac Knoblauch

Company

Rigid Inspections, LLC.  Founded 2016.

Why Home Energy Score?

Ability to offer a service that nobody else provides; even if not a “one-stop shop”, to be able to demonstrate a wide variety of expertise to potential clients.  To offer a service that can truly save my clients money and deliver a better living experience in their new home; confident that I’m getting in on the front-end of an important and growing market shift.

How do you sell it?

Feature it prominently on company web site, which is where much of my business is derived; no “hard sell” on this or any ancillary services; charge additional $50 to cover additional effort involved.

How does it impact your process?

Score is not yet integrated into Spectora inspection software (editor’s note:  Spectora is on the list of providers to be targeted asap for software integration with the HES), so data entry takes a few extra minutes; upcoming iPhone app will also address this issue; I’m already collecting most of the information necessary to produce the Home Energy Score.


Hot Takes on Home Energy

Keeping Home Energy Score tabs on the national media beat

What the Public Broadcasting Service lacks in excitement they make up for with levelheaded respectability and sheer audience size.  So, when that esteemed outlet holds the Home Energy Score up as one of the best first moves for people to take when trying to improve their home’s energy performance, it’s a good day for every HES Assessor across the land.

The current PBS article makes the very reasonable – but not very well understood – point that every home exhibits unique performance issues, and that homeowners/homebuyers aren’t well served by following cookie-cutter advice about how to make their homes more energy efficient, comfortable, and healthy.  What they need, rather, is a real pro on site to tell them what particular measures they should undertake, and in what order.

Read the article to see a good example of how the Home Energy Score’s profile is increasing across the country, as is the value of the expertise that HES Assessors bring to the table every day.


Selling The Score

Ongoing thoughts about how to flaunt the Home Energy Score now that you’ve got it

Here at ID Energy, we’re hearing some buzz lately from our home inspector graduates about a unique approach to marketing the Home Energy Score to homebuyer clients.  Call it the No-Travel Check-Back, this strategy ingeniously brings some of the best features of the Score to homeowners and agents at a time when they’re best able to appreciate those benefits.  Here’s HOW it works:

  1. Inspector collects all necessary Home Energy Score (HES) data during the initial home inspection, and files it away for safe keeping (time required = extra 10-15 minutes on average).
  2. Six months or so after the home buyer moves in, the inspector “checks back” with the client to offer a Home Energy Score now that they have lived in the home long enough to know its “energy performance” (read: utility bills and comfort issues).
  3. If the homeowner accepts, the HES report can be generated without having to return to the home (time required to enter data = 10-15 minutes on average) and delivered via email.

There are some great advantages to the No-Travel Check-Back approach, especially for inspectors who are trying to nurture a long-term relationship with their clients.  Here’s WHY it works:

  1. It’s a very low-pressure sales approach, one that is extended to the homeowner long after the hectic home-buying process is over and the client is in a more confident and receptive state of mind.
  2. It’s flexible, and can be offered for a fee or even as a no-charge service, since the time involved is so minimal and there’s no extra travel.
  3. It gives them something they actually need, since they’re typically either underway toward home improvement projects or are planning them, and the Home Energy Score tells them (using U.S. DOE-generated recommendations, not inspector-generated) how best to spend their efficiency-related upgrade dollars.
  4. It can be used to build relationships with both homeowners and real estate agent networks, depending on the inspector’s needs. If an inspector is especially focused on building a strong bond with a Realtor, for example, they can allow the Realtor to offer this high-value follow-up service, which can be delivered either through that grateful agent or through the inspector himself.

Any way you slice it, the No-Travel Check-Back is an innovative way to put the particular benefits of the Home Energy Score to best use. Give it a try and tell us if there are even more ways to work the Score into your business!


Getting Technical

Policy, tech tidbits, nerdy stuff

As you’ve probably heard by now, there’s a new sheriff in town in Portland, Oregon. The first major U.S. city to require a Home Energy Score as part of any home sale, the 2018 ordinance has inspired glorious hope in the hearts of home inspector/assessors throughout the city, and an equal measure of dread from the listing agents who see the rule as a great way to ruin a perfectly good home sale.

And while there’s little chance that the Home Energy Score will become the Law of the Land in your city anytime soon (we are talking about Portland, after all), it’s worth taking a close look at the early impacts of this policy as we look toward a day when the Score is an accepted and desired part of every home inspection, even when it’s not mandated by the powers that be.  You can subscribe to the mailing list to regularly geek out on the Portland experiment, but the early take-aways are easy to list and are pretty encouraging overall:

The “Scoring Tool” is Working

Of the 1800 or so homes that have been completed so far, the average score is 4.4, or just below the national average of 5.  Recommended improvements take the average home above a 7, which is projected to save over $300 per home.  These kinds of figures are proving both helpful to home buyers and not-so-scary to Realtors — which is the whole idea, after all.

Assessors are Getting Good at This

Feedback from the field confirms that home inspectors-turned-HES-Assessors are mastering the process of gathering information and delivering Scores efficiently, meaning that several Scores can be generated every day.  Prices for the service are in keeping so far with early projections – around $200 for a stand-alone Score, and many operators are bundling it with additional features.

The World Hasn’t Ended for Realtors

As we’ve said, early indications are that home buyers are grateful to receive the information that the Home Energy Score provides: how much they can expect to spend on their utility bills, for one, and also how best to spend their energy upgrade dollars when the time comes for those projects.  And here’s the good part – once home buyers have this kind of info in their hands, it turns out that they’re still willing to buy homes, and maybe even more willing.  It will take some time to crunch the Portland data in detail, but we can say even now that the home-selling sky is definitely not falling in the City of Roses.