The 4-month-old real estate startup that recently signed a deal with Lowe’s that will entrench its home remodeling network in more than 100 of Lowe’s store locations has announced another partnership.
Capitalizing on consumers’ growing preference for environmentally friendly builders, Porch has partnered with Home Innovation Research Labs to “take the guesswork out of green home buying and remodeling,” the company said.
As part of the partnership, Porch will generate profiles for all of Home Innovation’s National Green Building Standard (NGBS) Green Partner professionals. The profiles will be tagged with special badges and populated with professionals’ NGBS Green Certified home projects. The site is also offering upgraded profiles for free to NGBS Green Partner professionals for three months.
Home Innovation Research Labs, a subsidiary of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), claims to offer independent, third-party verification that new or remodeled homes, apartment buildings or land developments are “designed and built to achieve high performance in six key areas.”
“With the proliferation of green rhetoric in the marketplace, it’s become increasingly difficult for consumers to decipher what’s truly green from green-washing,” said Michael Luzier, president and CEO of Home Innovation Research Labs. “All projects that carry our NGBS Green Certified mark have been independently verified by third-party, accredited verifiers to ensure they meet the rigorous criteria of the NGBS.”
Green building’s share of the home remodeling market grew to 25 percent in 2013 from 17 percent in 2011, Porch said in a statement, citing numbers from NAHB.
Porch, which was one of Real Estate Connect’s “New Kids on the Block” and raised $6.5 million in seed funding in October 2012, claims to provide data on 90 million home projects and 1.5 million professionals. The startup has obtained that data mostly through an array of private partnerships that it cultivated for a year before officially launching three months ago, according to CEO Matt Ehrlichman.
In January, Porch announced a strategic partnership with Lowe’s that will equip the employees at 139 of the home improvement store’s locations with tools that will allow them to use the Porch network to connect customers with local professionals.
