Today we're speaking with Cynthia Adams, CEO and co-founder of Pearl, the company behind Pearl SCORE™, the national standard for how homebuyers evaluate home performance. Pearl has scored approximately 97 million single-family homes across the United States, giving buyers access to standardized performance data that has never existed before at this scale. With more than 250,000 Pearl-certified homes, 700+ data points evaluated per property, and a rating system spanning five pillars of home performance that impact everyday life in a home; Pearl has built the first comprehensive home performance registry in the country.
At SmartStop Self Storage, we help people navigate life's biggest transitions with flexible, accessible storage solutions across the United States and Canada. Many of our customers are in the middle of a move, evaluating a new home, managing a tight budget, and making one of the largest financial decisions of their lives. We were eager to learn how Pearl is changing what homebuyers can know before they sign, why the standard home-buying process leaves such a significant information gap, and how a single standardized number can give anyone, regardless of their background in building science, a clearer picture of what they are actually purchasing.
Q1. A lot of our customers come to us mid-move, between homes, or about to close on one. If you could tell a buyer one thing to do before they sign, what would it be?
Look up the home's Pearl SCORE™. It's free, takes a few minutes, and gives you a standardized read on what daily life in that home will actually feel like across five pillars: safety, comfort, operations, resilience, and energy. Most buyers choose a home with only a disclosure packet, a visual inspection, and a gut feeling. None of those tell you how the home will actually operate once you're in it. A Pearl SCORE does.
Q2. SmartStop built its brand around taking the stress out of storage with one app and everything at your fingertips. Pearl did something similar for understanding your home. What made you want to take something as complicated as home performance and turn it into a single number?
Because complexity is the enemy of action. When we started Pearl, homeowners had access to energy audits, inspection reports, utility bills, contractor assessments, all useful, none of it connected, none of it comparable. You couldn't look at two homes side by side and understand which one actually performed better. We believed that if you could put a single, standardized number on a home's performance, the way a credit score puts a number on financial health, people would actually use it. Pearl SCORE™ uses a 1 to 1,000 scale to score every single-family home in the U.S.. One number. Five dimensions of home performance. That's the goal.
Q3. A lot of people in storage are managing a tight budget through a transition. When money is limited, what are the small, practical things someone can do to make their home more comfortable and less expensive to run?
The highest-return, lowest-cost move for many homeowners, particularly in older homes, is air sealing. Weatherstripping and foam sealant are inexpensive and widely available. Sealing gaps around doors, windows, and electrical outlets, especially on exterior walls, reduces the amount of conditioned air you're paying to heat or cool that simply escapes the house. In Pearl SCORE terms, air sealing and insulation fall under the Comfort & Operations pillars, and it's one of the areas where we see the most room for improvement across the country. The second move is a programmable or smart thermostat, which is relatively low cost and can pay for itself quickly by reducing heating and cooling when no one is home. Third: replace HVAC filters on schedule. A clogged filter makes your system work harder, drives up energy use, and degrades air quality. These three things take an afternoon and can show up immediately in your comfort and your utility bill.
Q4. Most buyers compare homes on price, location, and curb appeal. Is there a dimension to that comparison that they're missing?
Performance. Until Pearl, there was no standardized way to compare how homes actually operate, how they hold temperature, how they handle a storm, how they perform across the five pillars that shape daily life inside them. Price is easy to compare. Location is easy to compare. Curb appeal shows up the moment you pull up. Performance was the dimension nobody could see, because there was no shared language for it. Two homes at the same price in the same zip code can perform very differently, and that difference shows up in every season a buyer spends in the home. SCORE organizes what's already on public record into one standardized view, so performance can sit on the comparison list alongside everything else.
Q5. What's the one thing you wish someone told you about your home before you moved in?
That comfort and efficiency are not the same thing as condition. A home can pass inspection with flying colors, no defects, no red flags, and still be expensive to operate, uncomfortable in certain seasons, and unprepared for a power outage or a bad storm. Those are performance characteristics, not defects, and a standard home inspection is generally focused on basic functionality rather than these more nuanced details. I wish someone had handed me a Pearl SCORE™ before I signed. It would have shown me how the home rated across the five pillars, which dimensions compared well and which ones I had questions worth bringing into my inspection and my first year of ownership. That's why we built it to be free and available for any home in the country, because every buyer deserves that information before they move in, not after.
