Countrywide Surveying Services

Countrywide Surveying Services operates a surveying and valuation practice based in the UK.

Energy Saving Trust worked with Countrywide to create EnergyFact, an online tool, informative advice report and energy surveying support tool all rolled into one. Designed to support house buyers and homeowners by providing information on their household contributions to climate change, EnergyFact includes recommendations, costs and savings of potential home upgrades, as well as other simple low cost ways to improve the energy efficiency of a home.

Countrywide Surveying Services (Countrywide) was looking to support customers wishing to make their homes more energy efficient, by helping them achieve reduced bills and healthier living through clear and accurate information on their survey products. Highlighting the climate change risk was also an important challenge, and one that Countywide saw as a unique market opportunity.

Under normal circumstances, Countrywide would send a chartered surveyor to customers’ homes, who would then advise on energy efficiency improvements. The biggest drawback to this method was the time and resources needed – they wanted a faster solution.

To speed up the process, Countrywide needed an advice resource to provide high quality and fully tailored energy saving guidance to householders. Discussions with surveyors identified the need to make provisions for both customer ‘self-service’ access and surveyor supported data input within a combined resource that accessed a comprehensive home energy data set for accuracy.

Keen to get their new EnergyFact idea powered up, Countrywide approached Energy Saving Trust after learning about the Home Energy Efficiency Tool.

With a secure self-service customer web tool and integrated surveyor optimised interface connected to a full home energy and climate risk database, Countrywide’s customers would be able to engage with energy saving guidance and bespoke, budgeted home improvement plans delivered through the final report generated through EnergyFact, which includes:

• current property characteristics
• recommended behavioural change measures
• information on carbon emissions (before and after improvements)
• environmental risk factors (data supplied by Landmark API)
• detailed information on energy saving measures

In light of the ongoing climate emergency, to get the sustainability messaging right, Countrywide product director John McCurry wanted to educate customers about what climate change actually means.

Countrywide has now launched EnergyFact  , an online tool that connects both their business users (surveyors, call centers and administrators) and customers to the relevant home energy savings data, climate risk data with energy saving guidance and recommendations.

Once customers provide information about their homes (the more data the customer supplies, the more accurate the results), such as type of building, age, number of bedrooms and more, surveyors can add further detail, allowing EnergyFact to calculate where they could implement energy saving measures, the cost of these measures and the savings they could achieve – both in terms of financial and carbon savings. Countrywide surveyors can then share this bespoke home energy savings plan with the customer.