CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Feb. 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Pearl, a home performance ratings-and-standards company, announced today it was named the winner of Inman’s 2025 Best of Proptech Award in the Sustainability & Climate Resilience category.
Pearl’s flagship metric, Pearl SCORE™, is the national standard for home performance, helping buyers, sellers, and real estate professionals understand a home’s performance across Safety, Comfort, Operations, Resilience, and Energy.
The recognition places Pearl among a select group of companies reshaping the future of residential real estate through innovation, data, and technology. Inman is the leading news source for real estate agents, brokers, executives, and technology leaders.
Real estate transactions traditionally focus on price, location, and aesthetics. Home performance measures something different: how well the physical structure protects health, maintains comfort, controls operating costs, withstands stress, and manages energy. It’s the difference between how a home looks and what a home is like to live in.
“As housing costs and risks rise, understanding how a home performs is no longer optional,” said Cynthia Adams, CEO and Co-founder of Pearl. “Every mature market runs on shared standards—and housing has been missing one for performance. For decades, home performance data has been inconsistent, incomplete, or impossible to compare. Pearl is changing that by creating a national standard and building the first system that makes home performance measurable, searchable, and actionable—so buyers can make smarter decisions with fewer surprises.”
Last fall, Pearl released the Pearl Home Performance Registry™ in public beta, the first comprehensive performance database of America’s single-family housing stock. For the first time, every one of the nation’s 92+ million single-family homes has been modeled and assigned a Pearl SCORE™—a standardized rating on a 1 to 1,000 scale that quantifies how well a home performs across five universal factors of home life – a framework designed to bridge the gap between expert analysis and lived experience:
- Safety — How well does this home protect against health hazards like mold, radon, carbon monoxide, poor air quality, and contaminated water?
- Comfort — Can this home maintain proper temperatures and humidity levels year-round? How well insulated is it? Does it protect occupants from outdoor noise?
- Operations — How efficiently do the home’s systems work together? How predictable are the utility costs?
- Resilience — How well does the home perform under stress like outages, flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, or severe temperatures?
- Energy — What are the home’s energy generation and storage capabilities?
Together, these five pillars give homebuyers a highly relevant, conceptual framework to understand and compare how a home does its job.
Robin LeBaron, Pearl’s President of Standards and Policy, said Pearl SCORE™ gives homebuyers something they’ve never had before.
“Homebuyers have only had half the story,” LeBaron said. “Location, price, and aesthetics matter—but so do safety, comfort, operating costs, resilience, and energy management. Pearl SCORE™ brings those elements into the real estate transaction in a credible, standardized way.”
LeBaron pointed to recent trends and events that have reshaped how people think about home performance. COVID-19 forced people to think about indoor air quality, storms and wildfires have brought new attention to whether homes can protect occupants from wind, water, smoke, and fire, and rapidly escalating energy and water prices are forcing homeowners to think about efficiency and energy management.
“Giving people agency through better information about their homes’ performance is essential,” LeBaron said.
Pearl will be attending the Inman Connect Conference 2026 in New York City, which runs from February 2 to February 5.
About Pearl
Founded in 2013, Pearl is a ratings and standards company that quantifies how well homes perform. As a Certified B Corporation, we’re accountable not only to our shareholders, but also to the homeowners and communities we serve. In 2024, Pearl acquired Radiant Labs, combining our rating methodology with Radiant’s market-leading data infrastructure to create the industry’s first comprehensive home performance registry. Our five-pillar framework and Pearl SCORE™ establish the first national benchmark for home performance — translating building science into clear, comparable metrics that help homeowners, buyers, and the real estate industry make informed decisions. For more information, visit pearlscore.com.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Bill Atkinson | [email protected] | 443-797-4150
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