For decades, the housing industry has operated on a familiar formula: cost, comps, and price per square foot. It’s simple and easy to explain.
But in a world shaped by climate risk, rising insurance costs, shifting regulations, and growing consumer expectations around health and performance, that equation is starting to look incomplete. Why? Because people are beginning to understand that homes don’t just cost money to buy—they cost money to operate, maintain, insure, and ultimately live in.
Increasingly, the industry is asking a bigger question: What is a home actually worth? That question sits at the center of the latest episode of The Valuation Metric, where Sara Gutterman speaks with Matthew Cooper, Senior Vice President and COO of PEG, a consulting firm specializing in energy efficiency, engineering, environmental and management solutions, about an emerging shift that could fundamentally change how homes are designed, built, and valued.
At the center of the conversation is something most homeowners—and many builders—rarely think about: embodied carbon.
Unlike operational carbon, which comes from the energy a home uses after move-in, embodied carbon accounts for everything that happened before day one: the extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and installation of the materials that make up the home itself. Think concrete, insulation, windows, roofing, HVAC systems—even the hidden components most buyers never see.
For years, measuring that impact in residential construction was difficult, inconsistent, and impractical.
That may be changing.
Cooper explains why a new standard—RESNET 1550—could become a major inflection point for builders, manufacturers, municipalities, and even lenders, bringing a level of visibility and accountability to housing that hasn’t existed before.
This conversation gets to the heart of value, asking whether higher-performing homes can:
It also addresses the big question: Can healthier, more resilient, lower-impact homes become not just the “right thing to do,” but a competitive business advantage? Cooper believes the answer is yes—but not by abandoning economics.
Listen to the full episode of The Valuation Metric to hear his solutions to critical issues facing housing today.