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Capturing the Sun: A Roadmap for Navigating Data-Access Challenges and Auto-Populating Solar Home Sales Listings

Publication Type

Report

Date Published

12/2016

Authors

Stukel, Laura, Ben Hoen, Sandra Adomatis, Craig Foley, Laura Parsons

Abstract

There are now over one million homes in America with solar panels. Yet real estate listing services (known as multiple listing services or MLSs) lack a standard way to report on the solar features of a home when it is placed on the market. Without this information, sellers may be losing out on value, and buyers may not know what they are getting. And real estate agents have a harder time bringing solar sellers and interested buyers together.

With more solar homes being sold, the market needs an improved process for listing, valuing, and closing on sales of these homes. The Roadmap proposes a way to fill that gap by guiding solar and real estate professionals through the key challenges and the best path forward to get solar data into MLSs. Experts from the real estate, appraisal, and solar data industries collaborated to write the report.

The Roadmap promotes the concept in the real estate industry known as “automatic population,” in which data aggregated in one industry can be automatically matched with home sale listings on an MLS. The Roadmap is intended as the first step toward auto-population, to help professionals identify barriers in a local context and develop the most appropriate implementation strategy in their market to connect the data to an MLS. It guides readers through a series of assessments to arrive at one of three recommended pathways. The recommendations are informed by real-world progress in three distinct case-study markets: Massachusetts, Colorado, and San Diego.

Year of Publication

2016

Notes

A webinar recorded on January 26, 2017 can be found here.