Want to Boost Your Home's Resale Value? Install a Heat Pump

Heat pumps are machines that heat and cool a home using electricity instead of burning gas or oil. A new report says that homeowners who install a heat pump can get back part of what they paid for it when they sell their home. The catch is that the heat pump has to be mentioned in the real estate listing — the advertisement used to sell the house. The report was put together by three groups: the nonprofit Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative, data company 257, and the National Association of Realtors.

Researchers looked at more than 500,000 sales of U.S. homes that had heat pumps, covering 2024 and 2025. They found that homes whose listings mentioned a heat pump sold for about 0.6 to 1 percent more than similar homes that did not bring it up. That might sound small, but it adds up to between $2,300 and $3,900 on a home with a median sale price of $399,000.

Scott Rosenberg is a cofounder and CEO of the data company 257, which helped write the report. He said that price bump really matters to homeowners. 'Just shy of $4K doesn't sound like a lot of money on a home sale,' Rosenberg said. 'But it's actually a meaningful piece of the investment that you made to get the heat pump in the first place.'

To make sure their findings were solid, Rosenberg's team used a computer method called machine learning. The computers grouped homes together that were nearly identical across hundreds of features. Then researchers compared sale prices within each group — some listings mentioned a heat pump and some did not — to see what difference it made.

A heat pump does more than just heat a home. Unlike a gas or oil furnace, it does not burn fuel, so it does not release harmful gases inside the house. It also cools a home in summer like an air conditioner, and it is two to four times more energy-efficient than a regular furnace, which can lower monthly utility bills.

Economics professor Yueming 'Lucy' Qiu from the University of Maryland said the new report was 'very valuable.' In 2020, she published her own study in the journal Nature Energy, looking at home sales across 23 states from 2000 to 2018. Her team found that homes with heat pumps sold for 4 to 7 percent more — or roughly $10,400 to $17,000 extra — compared to similar homes without them.

Qiu's study and the new report asked different questions. Her team wanted to know what a heat pump is worth to buyers overall, while the new report asked how much mentioning a heat pump in a listing helps the sale price. Both questions matter, and Qiu said she hopes the two teams will work together on a future study to compare their findings.

Real estate agents write the listings, but they often do not know enough about heat pumps to talk about them. The report found that more than half of all agents said they were 'not too confident' or 'not confident at all' in explaining heat pump benefits. In homes that already had a heat pump, the listing only mentioned it 8 percent of the time, which means most sellers miss a chance to earn more money.

Rosenberg believes things will improve as agents learn that buyers are willing to pay more for homes with heat pumps. He thinks this will create a 'virtuous-cycle effect' — the more listings mention heat pumps, the more buyers look for them, and the stronger the price boost becomes. For now, smart homeowners should make sure their heat pump gets a mention when it is time to sell.