Under a new city law, residents of Austin, Texas, must purchase costly energy audits before they will be allowed to sell their homes.
Prospective sellers must provide evidence they've had a professional analysis of items such as heating systems, cooling systems, draftiness and insulation. Austin joins San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif., as the only cities requiring such energy audits, which typically cost $200 to $300 apiece.
Experts agree that this is a bad policy:
- ... an environmental policy analyst, says that if prospective buyers desire an energy-efficiency assessment, they have the freedom to search for such information, on their own dime; whereas home sellers have no choice but to comply, or else they are potentially subject to criminal prosecution.
- consumer protection would be better met through requiring home inspections that could result in the identification of structural flaws than energy audits that are generally conducted by individuals interested in selling products to homeowners.
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