New multilist search to highlight green home features

For the past two years, a local Realtor and a grassroots group have been working to make it easier for homebuyers to find houses with environmentally friendly features.

Their efforts are about to pay off with a streamlined search function on the Greater Springfield Board of Realtors’ Multiple Listing Service. The enhanced search tool is set to launch by the end of March.

Murney Associates Realtor Zach Miller and members of the Ozarks Green Building Coalition worked together on the MLS tool, which features about 20 boxes that listing agents can check off to indicate green features – including high-efficiency heating and air or Energy Star appliances.

Once it’s launched, the green MLS feature will be accessible when potential homebuyers search for available properties from Realtors’ Web sites or through the Greater Springfield Board of Realtors’ site, www.gsbor.com.

“Any site really extracts the information from the multilist, so this should also affect Internet searches,” said Miller, who was appointed by GSBOR to serve as chairman of the group’s green committee and spearhead the multilist project with OGBC.

The key, he said, will be to educate Realtors about the green listings and how they can be used.

The green features listings go beyond simply checking a box. If a box is checked to indicate that an environmentally friendly feature is present, there are definitions for viewers, and homeowners and listing agents also can type in additional comments and information about the features.

“We want the seller to be able to work with the Realtor and describe what those features are,” Miller said.

To ensure legitimacy, sellers must explain on the listing why a particular feature is considered green –for instance, what makes the windows energy efficient.

“There are up to 37 characters to write in to explain why you checked the box,” Miller said.

Several real estate companies, including Carol Jones, Realtors, Coldwell Banker and Fitzgerald First Realty, as well as industry leaders and the Home Builders Association of Greater Springfield, are involved in helping GSBOR and the coalition put the green multilist together, Miller said.

Miller and fellow Ozarks Green Building Coalition member Mary Mike, of Mary Mike Professional Realty LLC in West Plains, researched other Realtor boards and listings in putting together the green features tool. One motivator is that it will enable buyers to compare prices for multiple homes that have green features.

“We reached a point where if people wanted to sell their homes, and if they had put more money into them because they are energy efficient, have wonderful indoor air quality, all the different aspects, … appraisers were not able to appraise them in the markets to resell at the price that they needed to be,” Mike said “The appraisers … have to work with the data that they have for comparables for (homes).” As a result, Mike said, there weren’t comparables for homes with green features on the multilist, which meant that some homes with green features were undervalued.

“If somebody has two homes and one is built green and one is not, and they are valued the exact same way,” said George Van Hoesen, an OGBC member and managing partner of consulting firm Global Green Building LLC, “then there is no real motivation for someone to say, ‘I want a green home.’” He noted that the green listing tool also enables potential buyers to look at a home’s utility history.

“If you’ve got a utility history, you can start comparing apples and apples,” he said. “It’s not that it’s sold for more and it cost me more, it’s that I’m going to be paid back true value.”[[In-content Ad]]