Want to estimate your monthly energy bill in your prospective new home — before you buy it? This new service may help.

Home shoppers often try to estimate the cost of monthly utilities payments on prospective homes by quizzing real-estate agents. A new feature unveiled by a brokerage hopes to demystify that number.

The feature, unveiled on Thursday by real-estate brokerage firm Redfin
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shows energy-cost estimates for 85 million homes nationwide.

The estimates are provided by WattBuy, an energy software company, which signed a partnership with Redfin.

“It’s important for house hunters to understand how much it’s going to cost to live in a given home,” Christian Taubman, chief growth officer at Redfin, said in a statement.

“Our research shows that many movers assume their utility costs will be similar in their new home, but that’s sometimes way off-base,” he added. 

The feature will sit below Redfin’s payment calculator. 

Each of these homes’ detail pages — which includes homes for sale on the market, as well as off-market homes — will show one of two things.

For homes on the market, the pages will give an estimate of the home’s monthly electricity usage, bill, and seasonal changes in electricity usage and cost.

For homes off the market, their page will estimate how much homeowners could save on long-term energy costs by upgrading to solar panels. 

“It’s a terrific idea,” Mark Toney, executive director at The Utility Reform Network, told MarketWatch. “It’s an absolutely essential part of a home.”

Toney said that the next big step would be to include estimated insurance costs.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average monthly bill for a residential property in America in 2021 was $121.

Got thoughts on the housing market? Write to MarketWatch reporter Aarthi Swaminathan at aarthi@marketwatch.com