You Can't Value What You Can't See: Calgary Maps Its Homes' Energy Performance

What's Stuck: Two things. First, the market for home energy retrofits is weak. Retrofit rates in Canada have run below 1% a year, projects are small and costly to sell. Even after the Canada Greener Homes Grant boosted activity fourfold, retrofitting more than 11 million homes at that pace could take up to a century. Homeowners also cannot compare their home's energy performance with similar homes, so many don't know they have an opportunity to save. Second, home energy labelling also has an adoption problem. The International Energy Agency recommends home energy labelling as best practice, and it's common across the European Union, usually required at point of sale. However, NRCan's home energy labelling program is voluntary, and uptake has been limited by a shortage of comparable labelled homes. A label means little when there's nothing to compare it to.

The Move: Calgary built a map for homeowners to see their home’s energy performance. Its Home Energy Performance Map shows energy scores for more than 350,000 single-family houses, duplexes, townhomes and row homes.[1] Most carry a digital energy score, estimated from average energy modelling for building archetypes, the home's size and construction year, using open municipal data. Homes assessed by an NRCan-registered energy advisor show their full EnerGuide label. Anyone can type in an address and see how a home compares.

What's Changed So Far: Home energy performance is now visible across Calgary's housing market. Each new EnerGuide label has a market context to land in, giving builders and renovators a reason to label their projects. Contractors and retrofit programs can see where older, less efficient homes cluster and design offers for whole groups of similar homes instead of one house at a time. Labelling is still voluntary, but the information that a working retrofit market needs is starting to flow.

Will the public map start a feedback loop at the scale of a housing market? So far, the results look promising. Alberta Ecotrust's pilot, funded by the Alberta Real Estate Foundation, found that 500 REALTORS and 41,000 homeowners engaged with the platform, resulting in over 84,996 digital home energy labels being viewed over just a three-month period.

The Bottom Line: Markets can change when the information flowing through them changes. Missing information is one of the most common reasons markets get stuck. Calgary's map has changed what the city’s housing market can see. Once a market can see the difference between a leaky house and an efficient one, it may start to value efficiency, and the retrofits that deliver it.

Local housing markets are part of a larger system. New information is often where systems change begins, not where it ends. Making energy performance visible builds awareness. Support for stronger rules, like mandatory labelling at point of sale, and programs designed to address other market barriers may follow.

Key Takeaways for Canadian Communities:

Information flows are a leverage point. Changing what people can see changes how they behave, often at far lower cost than new infrastructure or rules.

Close the loop. Put performance in front of the people who can act on it: buyers, owners, builders and renovators.

Treat information as market infrastructure. Shared data lets contractors, lenders and programs work toward retrofits at scale.

Keep pressing for provincial action. Municipalities can begin to activate the market by building its eyes, but mandatory labelling at point of sale belongs with provinces.