PRE- AND POST-SALE ENERGY AUDITS

Energy Audits for Sellers

Once you know that you will need to sell your home, you would probably start looking for a way to differentiate your house from those around you. What can you do to make your house stand out? What improvements will help you get the top dollar? And how to get your home sold fast? One of the important steps you could take is pre-sale Home Inspection and Energy Audit. Armed with information you could repair major items and leave cosmetic low impact repairs for negotiations. You will have to fix the substantial problem almost regardless on the type of deal you will arrange. Energy Audit helps you make some low cost energy efficiency improvements, which will help your house to stand out compared to conventional homes around.

Learn more about the improvements so that you can talk about them to potential buyers. Have your Realtor learn about those improvements, or deal with Green Realtors or Eco-brokers. For example, my own expertise lays within energy efficiency for homes. I carry out Energy Audits as part of my work for Centaurus Technologies and Innovations. This work helps me to teach home sellers and buyers about energy efficiency and building health issues.

The improvements should be documented or visible, or both. A buyer should be able to clearly see why your house is better than that of your neighbor.

Of course, Energy Audit and Home Inspection costs money. However, spending $400 for inspections and few hundred dollars on repairs may help you get more for your house and sell your home faster. Once a house stands on the market for a month or so, many agents recommend lowering price. Many homeowners see lowering price as the only tool available to them to lure potential buyers. You probably have heard of innovative ways homeowners in distressed markets like California and Florida. We cannot really offer a new BMW with our 100-200 thousand dollar homes in Oklahoma.

Yet, you do have a choice, a more practical choice. Logical and high impact improvements, which will differentiate your home from all those around.

Energy Audits for Buyers

Once you have bought your new house, first thing you will need to do is to find out all the inner issues of your house. Home inspection you've carried out prior to purchase gave you some good understanding of technical and functional issues. Energy Audit will help you with health and energy efficiency issues.

Home inspection has its legal place in a real estate purchase contract. Energy Audits do not have that legal place yet. Also, if you walk away from a house, you do not want to waste the money for an Energy Audit.