Expert Interview: Cynthia Adams on What a Whole-Home Performance Rating Reveals About Moisture, Resilience, and Energy
Today, we’re fortunate to interview Cynthia Adams, Co-founder and CEO of Pearl, about Pearl SCORE™, the national standard for how homebuyers evaluate home performance. Pearl has built the first comprehensive performance database of America’s single-family housing stock, scoring more than 97 million of the nation’s single-family homes and assigning each a Pearl SCORE that translates building science into a language homebuyers and agents can actually use, making it easy to compare homes and have real conversations about what it’s like to live in them.
At GreenHow, we’ve spent 20 years helping New England homeowners keep pests, termites, and mold out of their homes and lawns using low-impact, eco-friendly treatments. As specialists in pest control, lawn care, and mold remediation, we’re always interested in the structural side of home performance, the systems that determine whether a home actually manages moisture and airflow the way it’s supposed to. We were eager to learn how Pearl’s rating system is changing the conversation homeowners have about what’s really going on inside their walls.
Q1. We usually think of pest control and home performance as two completely separate categories. What’s the actual connection between a home’s structural performance and its risk of moisture and pest problems?
Cynthia: Pest control and home performance look like separate worlds, but they often examine the same systems. Tightening a home’s envelope changes how moisture moves through it, and that tension between air sealing and ventilation is well documented in building science. If you seal a home tighter without upgrading how it manages humidity and fresh air, the moisture collects in new places, inviting both mold and the conditions pests exploit. Pearl SCORE’s Operations pillar documents whether insulation, air sealing, ductwork, and building envelope features are in place, the structural elements that shape air and moisture movement, while Comfort tracks whether the home stays consistently dry and well regulated, including humidity control and drafts.
What Pearl documents is presence: whether those systems exist and are accounted for. Assessing how well they’re actually working day to day, checking for active moisture, spotting pest activity, treating what’s already there, is where a specialist like GreenHow’s expertise comes in. The two pictures work together: Pearl shows what’s built into the home, GreenHow shows how it’s holding up, and a homeowner ends up with a much clearer sense of what’s happening inside their walls.
Q2. New England homeowners deal with a lot of aging housing stock and increasingly severe storms. How does the Pearl SCORE framework think about a home’s resilience to extreme weather?
Cynthia: Resilience is one of Pearl SCORE’s five pillars because energy efficiency and storm readiness are different questions. A well-insulated home can still be unprepared for a major storm, flood, or extended outage. The pillar covers physical durability, flood and wind mitigation, and for New England it matters because so much of the housing stock predates modern resilience standards.
A storm-ready home isn’t necessarily a new home, it’s one where the owner has documented the generator, sump pump, or reinforced roof connections that listing photos never show. Pearl surfaces what’s there: the presence of preparedness features made visible and comparable, the same approach we take across all five pillars, so buyers and homeowners can see which resilience systems exist and which don’t.
Q3. Walk us through how Pearl SCORE actually evaluates a home. What are you looking at, and why organize it into these specific categories?
Cynthia: Pearl SCORE evaluates more than 150 features across five pillars: Safety, Comfort, Operations, Resilience, and Energy. It’s an absolute scale from 1 to 1,000, so a home’s position reflects the features it actually has documented, on its own terms, rather than a comparison to whatever else happens to be nearby.
Five pillars exist because performance isn’t just an energy question. Safety covers home features that improve indoor air and water quality. Comfort covers day-to-day consistency: temperature, humidity, drafts. Operations covers HVAC, insulation, air sealing, and ductwork. Resilience covers storm and outage preparedness. Energy covers generation, storage, and EV readiness. Pearl is building the national standard for how homebuyers evaluate home performance so that performance actually matters in a transaction, and organizing it into five pillars, evaluated the same way for every home, is how we make that standard usable. Ninety-seven million single-family homes across the country already carry a SCORE.
Q4. There are already tools like the DOE’s Home Energy Score and the HERS Index. How is Pearl SCORE different from an energy-only rating?
Cynthia: Home Energy Score and the HERS Index are useful, and neither tries to do what Pearl SCORE does. DOE’s Home Energy Score rates efficiency on a 1-to-10 scale, where a 10 uses less energy than most comparable homes, and RESNET’s HERS Index runs on a different scale, 100 for a home built to the 2006 energy code baseline, 0 for a net zero energy home. Both are energy-modeling tools, narrower by design.
Pearl SCORE is whole-home. Energy is one of five pillars alongside Safety, Comfort, Operations, and Resilience, so a home can score well on energy while still needing attention in resilience or comfort, the layers an energy-only tool was designed to leave to someone else. We see this as complementary: a homeowner’s existing Home Energy Score or HERS rating feeds naturally into the Operations and Energy pillars, adding to the picture rather than being replaced by it.
Q5. For a homeowner who’s about to invest in structural upgrades like air sealing or a heat pump, what should they be doing to make sure that investment is actually documented and understood down the line?
Cynthia: Claim the home inside Pearl app and record the feature in your home’s profile. High-performance upgrades, air sealing, a heat pump, added insulation, are invisible to a standard listing, and a buyer touring the home two years later has no way of knowing the work happened unless it’s documented. Claiming a home means confirming ownership and adding relevant features: install date, model number, and receipt.
That moves the profile from public-record estimates to owner-documented data, turning “I installed a heat pump” into a verifiable, comparable data point. This is about documenting home performance upgrades as they happen, capturing home improvement value you can point to later. It keeps the work a homeowner already did on record, visible and explainable, even when they’re not there to walk a buyer through it themselves.