How to Sell a House With Solar Panels

A house with solar panels sells the same way any other house sells right up to the moment someone asks who owns the panels. That single question, and the paperwork behind it, decides whether the array is an amenity that helps your listing or a contract that stalls your closing. Sellers are usually surprised by this, because the panels have been quietly cutting the power bill for years and have never felt like a legal object. In escrow they become one.

This briefing works through the transaction rather than the value question. Our home-value briefing already covers what panels are worth at resale; what follows is how they actually change hands. It covers the three financing paths and what each one demands at closing, the documents to assemble before you list, what happens to permits, interconnection and net metering, how to price and market the system without overstating what it saves, what the appraiser and the buyer’s lender each look at, and what to fix before the sign goes in the lawn. Every dollar figure below is an illustrative teaching number, and you can substitute your own in the companion calculator on this page.

How the system is financed decides the whole sale

Every practical question about selling a solar home resolves back to one variable: who owns the equipment on the roof. If you own it, the panels are part of the real property and they transfer with the deed the way a water heater or a set of kitchen cabinets does. Nobody has to approve the transfer, no third party has to be contacted, and the only work left is proving to a buyer and an appraiser that the system is what you say it is.

If a third party owns it, or if a lender has filed against it, the panels are not simply part of the house. They are the physical evidence of a contract, and contracts do not move to a new owner by themselves. Someone has to assume the agreement, or someone has to end it. That step involves a company with its own procedures, its own credit criteria and its own processing calendar, none of which care about your closing date. This is why two visually identical solar homes can have completely different sale experiences.

The honest framing for a seller is that the panels are rarely the problem. The financing is. Sort out which of the three paths you are on before you price the house, and most of the rest of this briefing becomes a checklist rather than a crisis.

The three financing paths and what each means at closing

Path one is outright ownership. You paid cash, or you took a loan and cleared it, and no lender or provider has any remaining interest in the equipment. At closing the panels convey with the house and the transaction looks ordinary. Your only obligations are disclosure and documentation.

Path two is ownership with debt still attached. You own the system, but a lender is owed a balance, and depending on how the loan was written that lender may hold a security interest in the equipment or a lien recorded against the property. The system still conveys, but the balance normally has to be paid off from the proceeds and the lender has to release its interest so the buyer takes clear title.

Path three is third-party ownership, which covers both the lease and the power purchase agreement. Under a lease you pay a monthly amount to use equipment that belongs to the provider. Under a PPA you pay for the electricity the system produces at a contracted rate per kilowatt-hour. The economics differ, but the transaction consequence is identical: the buyer must qualify for and assume the agreement, or you must buy it out before closing. Our lease versus buy briefing covers why this split matters when you are shopping for solar; here it matters because it sets the calendar for your sale.

Selling with a system you own outright

This is the straightforward case and it deserves a short section because there is genuinely little to do. The array is a fixture. It stays with the house, it appears on the listing as an included feature, and no provider approval is required. The buyer inherits an asset that reduces their electricity purchases for as long as the equipment keeps working, which on modern panels is measured in decades rather than years.

Your job is evidence. An appraiser cannot credit a system they cannot describe, and a buyer cannot value savings they cannot verify. Produce the original invoice or proof of purchase, the manufacturer warranty documents, the inverter details, the permits and final inspection sign-off, the interconnection agreement, and several years of production data. That package converts “there are panels” into a specific, quantified asset, and it is the single highest-return hour of work a solar seller can do.

The one remaining question a careful buyer will ask concerns the roof underneath. If the shingles are near the end of their life, the buyer is looking at a future bill to remove and reinstall the array, and they will price that in. Our roof replacement breakdown puts illustrative numbers on that job, and having an answer ready is far better than being asked cold at the inspection.

Selling with a solar loan still outstanding

A solar loan does not stop you selling, but it does add a step, and the step varies with how the loan was documented. Some solar loans are unsecured consumer debt. They follow you rather than the house, and in principle you can carry on paying after the sale, although most sellers prefer to clear the balance out of the proceeds and be done with it. Nothing appears in the title search and the buyer is unaffected.

Other solar loans are secured. The lender may hold a security interest in the equipment, recorded as a UCC financing statement, or in some financing structures an assessment or lien is attached to the property itself. In those cases the buyer’s title company will find it, the buyer’s lender will require it cleared, and closing cannot proceed until the holder issues a payoff figure and then a release. Neither of those documents is instant.

The practical instruction is simple. On the day you decide to list, contact the lender in writing and request two things: a payoff quote valid through your expected closing window, and a written statement of how the release is issued and how long it takes. Ten days is an illustrative allowance for a routine payoff and release, and it is far easier to build that into the schedule at the start than to discover it in week four.

UCC filings and what the title search will turn up

A UCC financing statement is a public notice that a lender has an interest in specific personal property, in this case usually the solar equipment rather than the house itself. It exists to protect the lender’s claim to the hardware, and it is a normal, unremarkable part of equipment financing. It becomes a transaction issue only because title companies search for it and buyers’ lenders react to it.

Two things commonly happen when one turns up. The buyer’s mortgage lender asks whether the filing could ever be read as encumbering the real property, and the title company asks for it to be terminated or amended so the record is clean. Where the underlying balance is being paid off anyway, this is procedural: the lender receives the payoff and files a termination. Where the balance is not being paid off, or where the filing is stale and relates to a loan already settled, someone has to chase the holder to clear the record, and that chase is unpredictable.

Two defensive habits help. First, if you have ever cleared a solar loan, confirm that the corresponding filing was actually terminated rather than assuming it was. Second, if you are still paying, ask the lender explicitly how the filing is handled on a sale. Getting a stale filing removed while you are in escrow with a deadline is a much worse experience than getting it removed while you are still deciding on a listing price.

Selling with a lease or a power purchase agreement

This is the path that causes the trouble, and it deserves plain language. Under a lease or a PPA, the panels on your roof are not yours. They belong to a company that installed them at its own cost and recovers that cost through your monthly payments or through what you pay for the power they generate. When you sell the house, you are not selling the panels, because you never owned them.

That leaves the contract, which has a remaining term and remaining obligations. It cannot simply be abandoned, and the buyer cannot simply ignore it, because the equipment stays on the roof. There are only two clean outcomes: the buyer takes the contract over, or you end it. Everything else is a variation on those two.

The reason this so often stalls a closing is timing. Both outcomes require the provider to act, and providers run their own transfer processes on their own schedules. A seller who requests the transfer packet the day after accepting an offer has already lost weeks that were available before listing. A seller who requests it before listing usually finds the whole thing manageable. The contract is not the problem; the contract discovered late is the problem.

Lease assumption and what the buyer has to qualify for

Assumption means the buyer steps into your shoes for the remainder of the agreement. From the provider’s point of view this is a new customer taking on a payment obligation, so the provider does what any company would do: it checks whether the new customer is likely to pay. That normally involves a credit application and a decision, and the criteria belong to the provider rather than to you or your agent.

Three practical consequences follow. The first is that your buyer pool narrows slightly, because a buyer who cannot meet the provider’s criteria cannot assume the contract, and that can force a late renegotiation. The second is that the buyer must accept the remaining term and whatever payment escalator the contract carries, which means they need to read and understand it, and they will need time to do so. The third is calendar: application, decision, document preparation, signing and confirmation all take days, and they run in sequence rather than in parallel.

The seller’s job here is preparation, not persuasion. Have the contract, the current payment amount, the escalator, the remaining term, the buyout schedule and the provider’s transfer instructions ready as a package. A buyer who receives all of that with the disclosure documents can start the application immediately. A buyer who has to request it piece by piece will start it three weeks later.

Buying out the contract before closing

The alternative is to end the agreement yourself so the system conveys owned and free of any third-party interest. Buyout figures come from the contract, usually as a schedule that declines over the term as the provider recovers its investment, and providers will issue a current figure on request. This route removes the buyer qualification risk entirely and simplifies the listing to the straightforward owned case.

Whether it is worth doing is arithmetic rather than principle. Compare three numbers: the buyout figure, the total remaining payments you would otherwise make or hand to a buyer, and the plausible equity credit that an owned system might add to your price. As an illustration only, a seller eight years into a twenty year lease might face roughly $12,800 of remaining payments and a buyout near $9,000, while conveying a 7 kilowatt system owned might support an equity credit in the region of $10,500. On those illustrative figures the buyout looks defensible, because it costs $9,000 to unlock something worth about $10,500 and it removes a month from the timeline.

Change any of the three numbers and the answer can flip, which is exactly why it should be calculated rather than assumed. Drop your own buyout figure and system size into the companion calculator and read the swing rather than trusting the shape of this example.

Days added to a closing by financing path

The clearest way to see why financing dominates a solar sale is to look at the calendar rather than the dollars. The chart below sketches how many days each path typically adds to a closing that would otherwise proceed normally. These are illustrative planning allowances, not measurements, and your provider, lender and title company will each have their own pace.

The point of the chart is not the specific numbers. It is that the gap between the shortest and longest path is roughly a month, and that a month is exactly the amount of slack a typical purchase contract does not have.

Where the thirty days of a lease assumption go

It helps to break the longest bar apart, because sellers often assume the delay is bureaucratic sludge that could be hurried along with a phone call. Mostly it is not. The stages run in sequence and each one waits on the previous.

Read that split as an instruction. Four fifths of the delay sits with the buyer’s application and the provider’s document production, so anything that lets the buyer apply on day one is worth more than any amount of follow-up later. Handing a complete contract package to buyers during the listing period is the cheapest way to buy back two weeks.

The document folder to assemble before you list

Build one folder, digital and physical, and put everything in it before the listing goes live. The contents are predictable and gathering them takes an afternoon.

Start with the money documents: the purchase invoice or the lease and PPA contract, the current payment amount and escalator if there is one, the buyout schedule, and any loan statement with a payoff contact. Add the ownership evidence: proof of purchase, the bill of sale, or the lender’s release if a loan has already been cleared. Then the equipment documents: panel and inverter make and model, system size in kilowatts, the manufacturer warranty terms, and the installer’s workmanship warranty. Our warranty briefing explains which of those coverages typically follow the equipment to a new owner and which do not.

Finish with the regulatory and performance material: the building permit and final inspection sign-off, the utility interconnection agreement, any net-metering documentation, and a production history covering as many full years as you can export. A folder like that answers most buyer questions before they are asked, gives the appraiser something to value, and quietly signals that the system has been looked after. It also protects you, because a documented disclosure is a much better position than a remembered conversation.

Production history is your strongest exhibit

Of everything in the folder, the production record does the most work. A buyer weighing your house against another is trying to answer one question: how much electricity does this roof actually make, and what is that worth against the bills I would otherwise pay. Marketing language cannot answer that. A multi-year export from the monitoring platform can.

Pull the annual totals rather than a single good month, because seasonality makes any one month misleading, and a full year absorbs weather. If your platform allows it, export monthly figures for three to five years so a reader can see both the seasonal shape and the year-over-year stability. Modest decline across the years is normal and expected; a step change usually indicates a fault or a shading change worth explaining honestly rather than hiding.

Then translate the total into money using your own rate rather than a national one. As an illustrative example, a 7 kilowatt system in a location with about 4.5 peak sun hours a day produces roughly 9,200 kilowatt-hours a year once ordinary system losses are allowed for, which at a 17 cent rate represents about $1,564 of electricity a year. That is a number a buyer can check against their own expectations, and it is far more persuasive than an adjective. Our monitoring article covers how to pull those figures cleanly.

Permits and inspection sign-offs

The permit file is boring right up to the moment it is missing. A residential solar installation normally requires a building permit and often an electrical permit, followed by an inspection and a final sign-off from the local authority. Those records establish that the work was done legally and inspected, which matters to a buyer, to their lender, and occasionally to an insurer.

Unpermitted or unfinalled work causes two kinds of trouble. The first is transactional: a buyer’s lender or attorney may require the permit to be closed out before funding, which means retroactive inspection and possibly remedial work on a deadline you do not control. The second is practical: unpermitted electrical work is exactly the sort of thing that complicates an insurance claim later, and a buyer who understands that will discount for it.

If you cannot find your paperwork, the local building department usually keeps records and can confirm what was permitted and finalled. Do that check early. Discovering an open permit ninety days before listing is an administrative task; discovering one during escrow is a renegotiation.

The interconnection agreement and who holds it

A grid-tied system does not simply push power onto the grid because the homeowner wants it to. There is an agreement with the utility that authorizes the connection, sets the technical conditions and defines how exported energy is treated. That agreement is usually in the name of the account holder, which is to say you, and it does not automatically follow the deed.

What happens on a sale varies. Some utilities treat the interconnection as attached to the premises and simply update the account name. Others require the new owner to sign a fresh agreement, and a fresh agreement may be written under whatever program rules are current rather than the rules you enrolled under. A few require the system to be re-verified. None of this is exotic, but all of it takes time and none of it is something your real-estate agent can answer for you.

The right move is a direct call to your utility, asking three specific questions: what happens to the interconnection agreement when ownership changes, what the new owner must do and by when, and whether any accumulated credits transfer or are forfeited. Get the answers in writing and put them in the folder. That single call resolves the most commonly misunderstood part of a solar sale.

Net metering and what actually transfers

Net metering is the arrangement that gives you credit for the electricity your system exports rather than consumes on site, and it is often a large share of a solar home’s real value. Our net metering briefing explains the mechanism; the point here is narrower and frequently missed. The credit arrangement is a program, and programs are revised.

Three things can happen when a solar home changes hands. The arrangement can transfer intact, so the buyer inherits the same terms you enrolled under. The buyer can be moved onto the current version of the program, which may credit exports differently and sometimes less generously than an older vintage. Or the utility can require a new application, with whatever conditions apply at that time. Which of the three applies is set by your utility and your state, and it can differ between neighboring service territories.

There is also the question of any accumulated credit balance. Some programs settle or forfeit a credit balance on a change of account, and a seller who has banked summer credits intending to use them in winter may simply lose them. That is a detail worth knowing before you sign a contract with a spring closing date. Ask the utility, do not assume, and never advertise a specific net-metering benefit to buyers that you have not confirmed will actually carry over.

Pricing the system into your asking price

Sellers reasonably want to recover something for the system, and the honest position is that an owned array typically supports a modest premium rather than a full recovery of what it cost. The premium is commonly described in two ways: as a dollar amount per kilowatt of installed capacity, or as a small percentage of the home’s price. As an illustrative figure consistent with the rest of our coverage, an owned residential system might be credited at somewhere around $1,500 per kilowatt in an ordinary market, which on a 7 kilowatt array is about $10,500, or roughly 2.6% of a $400,000 asking price.

Two forces move that. High local electricity rates raise it, because the savings the buyer inherits are worth more where power is expensive. System age lowers it, because fewer productive years remain and less warranty coverage is left. Neither adjustment is precise, and neither is a promise.

The important discipline is to price the house, not the equipment. Buyers compare houses against other houses, and a listing priced above the local comparable range because the seller added a solar line item tends to sit. Treat the premium as a reason your house should sell near the top of its range rather than above it, and let the documentation justify the position. Run your own size, rate and price through the savings calculator before you set a number.

Marketing solar honestly without overstating savings

There is a strong temptation to advertise the panels with a headline saving, and it is worth resisting the version of that temptation that promises a specific outcome. A buyer’s bill depends on their consumption, not yours. A household that runs two electric vehicles and cools the house to a lower setpoint will see a different result from the same roof than a couple who travel half the summer.

Better listing language describes the system and its record rather than a promised benefit. State the size in kilowatts, the panel and inverter type, the year installed, that it is owned outright if it is, the remaining warranty, and the measured annual production. Then let the buyer do their own arithmetic with their own usage. Specifics build credibility; superlatives invite scrutiny.

Two claims deserve particular care. Do not state a net-metering benefit you have not confirmed transfers, and do not present a tax credit you received as something the buyer will receive, because incentives generally attach to the original purchase and installation rather than to a later sale. If a buyer wants to understand what the quoted numbers mean, our solar quote briefing is a fair thing to point them toward, and it also reads as confidence rather than salesmanship.

How appraisers handle solar

Appraisal is where an abstract premium becomes a number on a form, and it works on evidence. The primary method is comparison: recent sales of similar nearby homes, ideally some with owned solar, which lets the appraiser observe what the market has actually paid. Where solar is common locally, this works smoothly and the premium tends to appear without a fight.

Where solar is rare, comparable sales are thin and the appraiser has less to work from. In that situation an appraiser may value the system from the income it effectively produces, meaning the electricity it generates and the purchases that avoids over the system’s remaining life. That approach needs inputs: system size, age, orientation, expected production, and the local rate. Every one of those comes from your folder, which is why the documentation is not administrative tidiness but the raw material of the valuation.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. A leased or PPA system is generally not credited as property value, because the homeowner does not own it, and an appraiser who credits it would be valuing someone else’s equipment. And no seller controls the appraisal outcome. What you control is whether the appraiser has to guess.

What the buyer’s lender looks at

Behind the buyer sits a mortgage lender, and lenders care about one thing above all: that the property securing their loan is free of competing claims. That focus explains most of their behavior around solar. A UCC filing, a lien, an unreleased security interest or an assessment attached to the property all raise the same question, which is whether anything could rank ahead of or interfere with the mortgage.

Lenders also care about the appraisal supporting the purchase price, which is where the valuation section above feeds back in. And some look at whether a lease or PPA payment should be counted in the buyer’s monthly obligations when assessing what they can afford. That last point occasionally matters: a monthly solar payment can reduce a buyer’s borrowing capacity slightly, which is one more reason a lease can narrow the buyer pool.

None of this is a reason to expect a refusal. Solar homes are financed routinely. It is a reason to have every claim on the equipment documented, released or clearly explained before the underwriter meets it. Underwriters escalate surprises, and escalation costs days you do not have.

What to fix before you list

A short list of pre-listing repairs prevents most inspection-driven renegotiations. Start with the roof, because it generates more solar-related friction than the panels do. If the covering under the array is near the end of its life, decide in advance whether you are replacing it, disclosing it, or pricing for it, and get a removal and reinstall quote so the conversation has a number in it rather than a fear.

Next, confirm the system actually works. Check the monitoring platform for offline strings, a tripped inverter or a panel that has been reading low, and get faults resolved before a buyer’s inspector finds them. A clean production record for the final months before listing is worth more than any explanation of a fault that has been left in place. Clean the array if it is visibly soiled, and if you are unsure how to do that safely our cleaning article covers the sensible approach.

Then tidy the periphery: exposed conduit that has come loose, missing labels on disconnects, a rodent screen that has failed, or a mount showing sealant failure. None of these is expensive on its own, and each one is the kind of small finding that makes a buyer wonder what else has been neglected. Finally, resolve any open permit, because that is the one item on this list that can genuinely stop a closing.

Disclosure and what a buyer is entitled to know

Disclosure obligations are set by state law and by your listing paperwork, and the exact requirements are local enough that your agent or a real-estate attorney should confirm them rather than an article. What can be said generally is that the presence of a contract, a balance or a lien on the solar equipment is precisely the kind of material fact buyers and lenders expect to see, and it will usually emerge from the title search regardless.

The practical case for disclosing early is not just legal caution, it is negotiating position. A lease disclosed in the listing is a known condition that buyers price into their offer. The same lease discovered in week five of escrow is a surprise, and surprises get renegotiated at a discount that usually exceeds the honest cost of the contract. Trust once damaged tends to be repurchased with money.

The same logic applies to roof condition, known leaks near mounts, past repairs and any work you know was not permitted. Write it down, hand it over, and let the buyer make an informed decision. It is also worth remembering that everything in the disclosure package is a document you will be glad to have kept if a question surfaces after closing.

A worked example of two identical houses

Consider two houses on the same street, both listed at $400,000, both carrying a 7 kilowatt array installed the same year, both producing roughly 9,200 kilowatt-hours a year, which at a 17 cent rate is about $1,564 of electricity annually.

House A owns its system outright. The seller assembles the folder, discloses the roof age, and lists. The panels convey with the deed, the appraiser credits an illustrative $10,500 for the owned system, about 2.6% of the asking price, and the transaction adds perhaps three days for document gathering. Nothing else changes.

House B is eight years into a twenty year lease with about $12,800 of remaining payments and a buyout quoted at $9,000. If the seller does nothing, the buyer must apply to the provider and assume the contract, which adds roughly thirty days and shrinks the pool to buyers who qualify and accept the remaining term. The appraiser credits nothing for the system, because the house does not own it. If instead the seller pays the $9,000 buyout before listing, the system converts to the House A case: the array conveys owned, the illustrative $10,500 credit becomes available, and the net swing is about $1,500 in the seller’s favor before counting the month of calendar saved and the wider buyer pool.

That $1,500 is small enough to be erased by a different buyout figure or a softer market, which is the real lesson. The buyout is not automatically right; it is a calculation, and the calendar and buyer-pool effects often matter more than the dollars.

The seller timeline from ninety days out

Working backward from a target listing date makes the whole thing manageable. At roughly ninety days out, establish which financing path you are on by actually reading the contract or the loan documents rather than remembering them. Request the buyout schedule or the payoff quote at the same time, and call the utility about interconnection and net-metering transfer.

At sixty days, close the loops the first calls opened. Confirm any historic UCC filing was terminated, resolve any open permit with the building department, and get a removal and reinstall quote if the roof is questionable. Fix system faults now so the production record going into listing is clean, and export the multi-year production history.

At thirty days, assemble the folder in final form and decide the buyout question if you are on a lease or PPA. Write the listing description around verifiable specifics. At listing, publish the disclosure with the contract details attached so any interested buyer can start a transfer application immediately rather than after an accepted offer. Under contract, hand the payoff, release and transfer requests to the title company on day one and treat them as parallel work rather than sequential.

Common mistakes that stall a solar closing

The first and largest is discovering the contract late. Sellers who have not read their lease since signing frequently misremember the term, the escalator or the buyout, and the correction arrives at the worst possible moment.

The second is assuming net metering transfers. It sometimes does not, and a buyer who was told it would and then finds otherwise has a legitimate grievance and a reason to renegotiate. The third is advertising a savings figure taken from your own bills as though it were the buyer’s future bill, which invites a dispute about a number you were never in a position to promise.

The fourth is ignoring the roof, which converts a manageable disclosure into an inspection-driven price cut. The fifth is leaving a stale UCC filing in place after clearing a loan years earlier, because the release chase is slow and nobody thinks about it until the title search runs. The sixth is treating the provider’s transfer process as something that can be accelerated by pressure; it usually cannot, and the only real lever is starting sooner. Every one of these is prevented by work done before the listing rather than during escrow.

Put your own numbers in

The figures in this briefing are teaching shapes, and the structure is what carries over rather than the amounts. Your system size, your rate, your asking price and your actual buyout or payoff figure produce a different answer, sometimes a different decision.

The companion tool on this page takes five numbers you already have or can get with two phone calls: your asking price, your system size, which financing path you are on, the payoff or buyout balance if there is one, and your electricity rate. It returns the yearly bill relief a buyer would inherit, the illustrative equity credit an owned system might support, the balance you would clear at closing, your net solar position and what it is as a share of the asking price, and the planning allowance of days the path adds.

Read the net position as a comparison rather than a forecast. If you are on a lease or PPA, the useful output is the swing: what changes if you buy the contract out and convey the system owned. If that swing is positive and comfortably so, buying out is worth serious consideration. If it is marginal, the calendar and buyer-pool arguments should decide it rather than the dollars, and either way the number to trust is the buyout figure your own provider puts in writing.

The bottom line

Selling a house with solar panels is straightforward when you own the system and complicated when you do not, and almost every problem sellers hit traces back to that one distinction. An owned array conveys with the deed and needs nothing but documentation. A solar loan needs a payoff and a release, and any UCC filing needs terminating, which the title search will insist on. A lease or a power purchase agreement needs either a qualified buyer willing to assume it or a buyout, and on illustrative figures the assumption route adds around thirty days, four fifths of which sits with the buyer’s application and the provider’s paperwork.

Do the work before the sign goes in the lawn. Read the contract, get the payoff or buyout in writing, confirm with your utility what happens to the interconnection agreement and to net metering, close any open permit, fix any fault, and build one folder containing the contract, warranties, permits, interconnection documents and several years of production data. Price the system as a modest premium rather than a cost recovery, illustratively around $1,500 per kilowatt for an owned system in an ordinary market, and market it with verifiable specifics instead of promised savings. Do those things and the panels become what they should be at resale: a documented asset, on a sound roof, with nothing attached to it that anyone has to untangle.

WattBarn publishes this briefing to explain how home solar systems change hands in a residential sale, and it is not legal, tax, real-estate, appraisal, or financial advice for any particular transaction. Every dollar amount, percentage, and day count above is an illustrative teaching figure chosen to show how the decision works, not a quotation, an appraisal, or a measurement, and your own contract, lender, utility, and market will produce different numbers. Disclosure duties, lien and financing-statement procedures, interconnection rules, and net-metering transfer terms are set by your state, your county, and your utility, they change over time, and none of them can be determined from an article. Read your own contract, obtain written payoff or buyout figures from the party that holds the agreement, confirm interconnection and net-metering treatment directly with your utility, and take questions about disclosure, title, and contract terms to a licensed real-estate professional or attorney in your state before you list or sign.