Buying a home means making one of the largest decisions of your life based on a couple of short visits. The things that shape daily comfort, like heating, cooling, and air quality, are nearly impossible to judge from a walkthrough. We recently sat down with Cynthia Adams, Co-Founder and CEO of Pearl, the company behind the Pearl SCORE™, the national standard for how homebuyers evaluate home performance, to talk about how buyers can understand what a home will actually be like to live in, especially when it comes to staying comfortable through a Minnesota winter.
Pearl, a Certified B Corporation, has analyzed more than 97 million U.S. single-family homes in its Pearl Home Performance Registry™. Its work translates complex building science into a clear, whole-home picture organized around five pillars. We asked Cynthia how that helps homebuyers make sense of what they are buying, and what it means for HVAC professionals like Minneapolis-based Blue Ox Heating & Air.
Blue Ox Heating & Air: Where does heating and cooling fit into how Pearl helps a buyer understand a home?
Cynthia Adams: Every home we rate is evaluated across five pillars: Safety, Comfort, Operations, Resilience, and Energy. Heating, cooling, ductwork, insulation, and air sealing are scored in more than one of them. Operations looks at how efficiently those systems run and what they cost to operate. Comfort looks at what they actually deliver — whether rooms hold a steady temperature, whether humidity stays in range, whether you feel a draft. Air quality is scored in Safety, and how the home performs in a heat wave or a cold snap is scored in Resilience. Those are exactly the things a buyer cannot judge from a 30-minute showing.
Blue Ox Heating & Air: A buyer can see a kitchen, but how are they supposed to understand something like a heating system?
Cynthia Adams: That is the core problem we set out to solve. A buyer can size up the finishes, but the things that shape daily life, like how efficiently the furnace runs, whether the ductwork is sealed, and how well the home holds heat, are hidden behind the walls and almost impossible to assess in a showing. Pearl turns that complexity into one number – a Pearl SCORE on a 1 to 1,000 scale – with plain language detail behind it. Instead of guessing, you get a framework for what to expect and the right questions to ask.
Blue Ox Heating & Air: For a cold-climate buyer, which heating and cooling details shape that day-to-day experience the most?
Cynthia Adams: In a climate like Minneapolis, the heating system shapes the experience more than almost anything else. A properly sized, high-efficiency furnace or a cold-climate heat pump keeps a home comfortable through deep cold, but so does the work around it: sealed ductwork, good air sealing, and balanced airflow so no room is freezing while another bakes. Two homes with similar furnaces can feel completely different to live in, depending on how carefully that surrounding system was designed. Understanding those details ahead of time tells a buyer what their winters will actually be like.
Blue Ox Heating & Air: How can an HVAC company like Blue Ox help make all of this clearer for buyers?
Cynthia Adams: HVAC professionals know what is really behind the walls, so they play a big role in making a home’s performance legible to everyone else. When a company like Blue Ox installs a high-efficiency system, seals ductwork, or upgrades a home to a heat pump, that work can be captured in the home’s record in the Pearl Home Performance Registry and reflected in its Pearl SCORE. That gives the next buyer an accurate, understandable picture instead of a mystery, and it gives the current homeowner a straightforward way to show how their home actually performs.
Blue Ox Heating & Air: What is your advice to someone shopping for a home this year?
Cynthia Adams: Look past the cosmetics and ask how the home actually performs, because that is what you will live with every day. Ask how the heating and cooling systems are set up, whether the ductwork and the envelope have been addressed, and look up the home’s Pearl SCORE at pearlscore.com. A beautiful kitchen is easy to see. A home that stays warm, even, and healthy through a hard winter is harder to judge but matters far more to daily life. The goal is to understand what you are walking into before you sign, not after.
