New NAR Guide Helps MLSs Highlight Green Homes and Features
Finding and selling green homes is about to get easier for buyers and sellers with the National Association of REALTORS®’ new Green MLS Implementation Guide, NAR Green MLS Implementation Guide.pdf a comprehensive guide for helping multiple listing services promote the special features of a green home.
“The demand for green is growing; NAR’s research consistently shows that today’s consumers want homes and communities that are environmentally sustainable and resource efficient,” said NAR President Steve Brown. “Currently, home listings with green features are not always adequately highlighted in many MLSs. Accurate marketing and assessment of green homes can only move forward with more standardized language among MLSs; the Implementation Guide, paired with NAR’s Green MLS Tool Kit, can help REALTORS® be part of the process to get green fields in their MLS.”
The guide is designed to supplement NAR’s Green MLS Tool Kit by providing a blueprint for MLS staff or their software vendors to implement the MLS with green data entry fields. If MLSs have not yet included green fields, the guide provides the necessary information to help REALTORS® be agents of change in their area. The guide also helps protect agents, appraisers and other users from the liability of posting incorrect information and keeps entries compliant with terms defined by the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) Data Dictionary, which serves as a guideline and standard for entry fields in MLS databases.
With this new guide, REALTORS® can help homeowners bring greater awareness to the green features they’ve added to their home. REALTORS® can also help consumers seeking green homes quickly locate properties with those features. The new green MLS fields will also allow for apples-to-apples comparison when appraising green homes and for green home data to be easily aggregated for determining market trends, such as time-on-market and sale-to-list price ratios for green homes versus non-green homes. Green MLS features will also give REALTORS® the ability to use their green expertise for branding and marketing and to establish themselves as the local go-to green agent.
NAR’s Green REsource Council, which develops awareness and understanding of green real estate principles, worked with a number of organizations to create the Green MLS Implementation Guide including Elevate Energy, a nonprofit organization helping consumers and communities obtain the information and services they need to control energy costs, and the Real Estate Standards Organization, which oversees the NAR®-supported Real Estate Transaction Standard, which helps define an approach for exchanging listings with MLSs.
