Starting January 1, 2026, Berkeley requires most home sellers to get an energy assessment before listing and then complete one of three specific compliance paths before the sale closes — upgrade the property, document an existing heat pump setup, or put $5,000 into escrow for the buyer to handle it later. This is Berkeley’s Building Emissions Saving Ordinance (BESO) Time-of-Sale requirement, and it applies on top of every other disclosure you already have to make as a California seller.

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Who the January 1, 2026 Deadline Actually Covers

The Time-of-Sale requirement phases in by building type. Single-family homes and duplexes are covered starting January 1, 2026. Triplexes and fourplexes get a two-year grace period before the full requirement applies, with compliance starting January 1, 2028 — until then, those buildings only need an energy assessment completed before listing, not the full upgrade-or-deposit sequence. Condominiums and accessory dwelling units are excluded from the Time-of-Sale requirement entirely. If you are selling a Berkeley single-family home or duplex any time after the new year, assume the full requirement applies to you; if you’re selling a triplex or fourplex before 2028, the assessment-only rule is what currently applies, with the fuller requirement arriving later.

Step One: The Home Energy Score, Before You List

Before a covered property can go on the market, the seller has to hire a Registered BESO Energy Assessor to produce a Home Energy Score for the home. In a multi-unit building, each unit gets its own separate score — you cannot average across units or score the building as a whole. That score then has to be posted in the Property Notes section of the MLS listing, and the full Home Energy Score Report has to be included in the disclosure and transfer documents that go to the buyer. Reports are valid for five years, so if you had an assessment done for a prior listing attempt or a refinance within that window, it may still be usable rather than needing to be redone from scratch. Skipping this step is not a minor paperwork miss — Berkeley attaches a specific $500 non-compliance fee to a seller who fails to complete and disclose the Home Energy Score Report, separate from whatever other consequences follow from skipping the rest of the ordinance.

Step Two: Pick One of Three Paths Before the Sale Finalizes

Once the Home Energy Score is in hand, Berkeley requires the seller to choose one of three compliance paths before the sale is finalized. This is the part of the ordinance that actually changes what a seller has to do, and it is worth understanding all three before assuming one is obviously easiest.

Option One: Complete the Upgrades

The property can be brought up to the ordinance’s Resilience Standard, which requires earning at least six qualifying credits per unit. Qualifying upgrades include heat pump water heaters or HVAC systems, solar photovoltaic installation, electrical panel upgrades, and insulation improvements. Upgrades completed within the five years before the sale can count toward the credit total, which means a seller who already did some of this work for other reasons — a panel upgrade during a kitchen remodel, say — may already be partway there. Once the credits are met, the seller files on the BESO Portal along with a $150 fee to receive a Certificate of Compliance, which is what actually satisfies this path of the requirement.

Option Two: The Heat Pump Exemption

If every unit in the building is already served by an electric heat pump water heater or an electric heat pump HVAC system, the seller can claim an exemption from the full upgrade path rather than earning the six credits separately. This requires submitting documentation — either a building permit showing the heat pump installation or the Home Energy Score Report itself showing the equipment — along with the applicable filing fee. This path exists specifically for homes that happen to already be electrified in the ways the ordinance cares about most, sparing those sellers from having to prove compliance through the credit system when the underlying equipment already meets the ordinance’s real goal.

Option Three: Defer to the Buyer With a Shared Deposit

For sellers who do not want to complete upgrades before closing and whose property does not qualify for the heat pump exemption, Berkeley built in a third path: deferring the upgrade obligation to the buyer. The seller, the buyer, and the title company jointly submit a BESO Upgrade Deposit Form, and $5,000 goes into deposit — split evenly, with $2,500 coming from the seller and $2,500 from the buyer. The buyer then has two years after closing to complete the required upgrades, with a one-year extension available if needed. Once the buyer finishes the upgrades and submits their own Certificate of Compliance, the deposit is refunded. In practice, for a lot of Berkeley sales where neither party wants to hold up closing over a heat pump installation, this deposit path is likely to be the one most transactions actually use — it keeps the sale on a normal timeline while pushing the physical work to whichever party is actually going to occupy the property going forward.

Exemptions Worth Knowing About

Beyond the heat pump exemption tied to Option Two, the ordinance carves out a couple of other situations. All-electric homes with no gas service at all — verified through documentation showing gas lines have been capped — are exempt from the upgrade requirement, since there is no gas-reliant equipment left to electrify. Buyers purchasing through an income-qualified first-time homebuyer program, such as CalPLUS or MyHome, also qualify for an exemption with appropriate verification, reflecting that the ordinance’s drafters did not want the deposit or upgrade cost landing on buyers for whom it would meaningfully affect housing affordability at the entry level. There is also an early-refund provision: buyers who have already signed a contract with a licensed contractor and pulled building permits for the required upgrades can receive their portion of the deposit back before the work is actually finished, rather than waiting for full completion.

What Actually Counts Toward the Six Credits

The Resilience Standard’s credit system covers more than just heat pumps, even though heat pumps get most of the attention. Qualifying measures reported in coverage of the ordinance include heat pump water heaters, heat pump HVAC systems, solar photovoltaic installation, electrical panel upgrades sized for electrification (sometimes described as “EV-ready” panels), insulation improvements, and induction ranges. Different measures carry different credit weights toward the six-credit-per-unit threshold, and a seller who has already made a few electrification-related upgrades for unrelated reasons — replacing a water heater that failed, or upgrading an electrical panel during another project — may be closer to the threshold than they realize without having tracked it as “BESO credits” at the time.

Local real estate agents are reportedly already building this into pre-listing checklists for Berkeley properties, and some listings have begun marketing themselves as “BESO-ready” — meaning the seller has already completed enough qualifying upgrades that a buyer does not need to think about the ordinance at all when making an offer. Whether that marketing angle helps or simply reflects the new baseline expectation for the Berkeley market is still shaking out, but it signals that buyers’ agents are starting to ask about BESO status as a matter of course on covered properties, not as an unusual question.

Why Berkeley Adopted a Point-of-Sale Trigger

Tying building electrification requirements to the moment of sale, rather than only to new construction or voluntary remodeling, is a deliberate policy choice other cities have made in different forms — some require an energy assessment or rating disclosure at sale without mandating specific upgrades, while a smaller number of cities require actual audits. Berkeley’s ordinance is notable for going a step further than a disclosure-only requirement by tying specific physical upgrades, or a financial deposit standing in for them, directly to the transaction itself. The city’s own rationale, as expressed through the rulemaking and the online BESO Portal, uses the point of sale as a natural checkpoint, since it is one of the few moments when a property reliably gets inspected, documented, and transferred — making it a practical lever for driving electrification upgrades that might otherwise never happen on a property with a long-term, unmotivated owner.

Common Mistakes Sellers Make With This Requirement

The most common mistake is treating the Home Energy Score assessment as something that can be scheduled casually, late in a listing process. Registered BESO Energy Assessors are a limited pool, and in a market where many Berkeley sellers are all listing around the same time — spring, typically — booking an assessment close to your intended listing date can mean a longer wait than you expect. Ordering the assessment several weeks ahead of your target listing date, rather than the week you plan to go live, avoids this becoming the reason your listing slips.

A second common mistake is assuming the deposit option is automatically available without coordinating with a title company ahead of time. Not every title company handling Berkeley closings is equally familiar with the three-way Upgrade Deposit Form process, and a seller who assumes this is a routine, well-worn piece of paperwork can be surprised to learn their title company needs extra lead time to process it correctly. Asking early, rather than during the final week of escrow, avoids this becoming a closing delay.

A third mistake is confusing enforcement with criminal liability. Noncompliance with the ordinance is handled through administrative remedies — fees and compliance requirements — rather than criminal penalties, which means failing to comply does not expose a seller to the kind of enforcement some other municipal code violations carry. That does not make noncompliance a good option; the $500 fee and the underlying unresolved upgrade obligation are real costs, just not criminal ones.

What This Means for Your Closing Timeline

Unlike a lot of disclosure requirements that simply add paperwork to a closing, BESO’s Time-of-Sale rule can genuinely affect how fast a sale moves if a seller is not prepared for it. Ordering a Home Energy Score assessment before listing — not after an offer is accepted — avoids a scramble to get an assessor scheduled while a buyer’s contingency clock is already running. Deciding early which of the three compliance paths you intend to use also matters: a seller who assumes they will simply pay into the deposit option, only to discover partway through escrow that their title company needs time to process the three-way Upgrade Deposit Form, can lose days they did not budget for near the end of a transaction. None of this is an unreasonable amount of friction once you know it is coming, but it is friction a seller unfamiliar with Berkeley’s ordinance will not see coming at all.

How This Compares to Other Bay Area Point-of-Sale Rules

Berkeley is not the only Bay Area city layering its own requirements onto a home sale beyond what state law requires. Oakland’s rental registry program imposes its own seller-facing requirements on certain rental properties, and other cities in the region have their own energy, inspection, or disclosure ordinances tied specifically to the point of sale rather than to ongoing ownership. We’ve covered Oakland’s rent registry seller requirements separately, and the pattern across these cities is similar: a real, city-specific compliance step that a seller moving from a different part of California — or even a different Bay Area city without the same ordinance — would have no reason to expect.

When a Cash Sale Still Requires Dealing With This

It is worth being straightforward here: selling to a cash buyer or an investor does not exempt a covered Berkeley property from the BESO Time-of-Sale requirement. The ordinance attaches to the sale of the property itself, not to the type of buyer, so the Home Energy Score, the choice among the three compliance paths, and any associated fees still apply regardless of whether you are selling to a traditional buyer or an all-cash purchaser. What a cash sale can simplify is the negotiation around which of the three paths to use — an experienced cash buyer familiar with BESO may be comfortable taking on the deposit-and-defer option directly as part of the purchase, handling the eventual upgrade themselves, in a way a first-time buyer with a mortgage lender unfamiliar with the ordinance might find more complicated to coordinate. A lender financing a buyer’s purchase may also have its own view of a property with an open $2,500 deposit obligation attached, which is one more reason a cash transaction can move more predictably through this specific compliance step than a financed one.

None of this changes the underlying math of what you’ll net from the sale as dramatically as sellers sometimes assume. Whether you complete upgrades, qualify for the heat pump exemption, or use the deposit option, the dollar amounts involved — the $150 filing fee, the $500 non-compliance fee if you skip disclosure entirely, or your $2,500 half of a shared deposit — are modest relative to a typical Berkeley home sale. The real cost most sellers underestimate is time: getting an assessment scheduled, deciding on a compliance path, and coordinating the paperwork with your title company all take longer than people expect if they start thinking about BESO only after receiving an offer.

First Steps Before You List a Covered Berkeley Property

Confirm your property type and whether the January 1, 2026 full requirement applies now, or whether you’re in the 2028 grace period for a triplex or fourplex.
Hire a Registered BESO Energy Assessor and get your Home Energy Score before you list, not after you’re under contract.
Decide early which of the three compliance paths fits your timeline and budget — upgrades, the heat pump exemption, or the shared deposit.
If you expect to use the deposit option, ask your title company how early they need the three-way Upgrade Deposit Form to avoid delaying closing.
Check whether any upgrades you completed in the past five years already count toward the six-credit Resilience Standard before assuming you need to start from zero.

If you’re navigating this requirement on a Berkeley property and want to sell without managing the compliance process yourself, Cash Home Buyers CA can give you a no-obligation cash offer and work through which of BESO’s three paths makes the most sense for your specific timeline. For more on what else to disclose when selling your Berkeley home as-is, see our broader guide on California’s as-is disclosure requirements.

Berkeley’s New Time-of-Sale Energy Rule Nobody Warns Sellers About