OPEN Technologies Bringing Residential Decarbonization Virtual Home Label to Toronto
View of Toronto skyline, photo by Ali Cuhadaroglu
OPEN Technologies is pleased to announce a collaboration to bring the OPEN Virtual Home Label to Toronto. The initiative will give homeowners across the city a clear, personalized way to understand their home’s energy and emissions performance — and a roadmap to improve it.
Toronto’s homes and buildings hold enormous potential to reduce community-wide emissions: they make up 55% of Toronto’s greenhouse gas emissions. The largest source of these emissions is fossil (natural) gas heating in residential buildings, which accounts for 26% of community-wide emissions.[1] Every investment in airtightness, insulation, heat pumps, and on-site renewables is a meaningful step toward the city’s climate goals.
The tool will be available to the public in the coming months.
About the City of Toronto’s Climate Strategy
Toronto’s TransformTO Net Zero Strategy charts an ambitious path forward, including a target to reduce community-wide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Toronto to net zero by 2040. It is one of the most ambitious targets in North America, and to reach net zero, more than 400,000 homes in Toronto must be renovated to be more energy efficient and to reduce fossil fuel use. This collaboration is designed to help unlock that potential by giving every homeowner a clear, personalized path to act.
The City already supports homeowners through a growing set of programs through BetterHomesTO, including the Home Energy Loan Program, capacity-building activities with the home renovation industry, and free virtual energy coaching as part of the Furnace Upgrade Program. The Toronto Virtual Home Label is designed to complement these efforts, giving the City a free, public-facing, homeowner-centred front door to its residential decarbonization work.
About OPEN Technologies
OPEN Technologies (“OPEN”) builds data-driven software tools that help cities, property owners, and policymakers make confident, pro-climate decisions about the built environment. Our products turn limited building data into high-quality decarbonization insights, generating comparable planning outputs at a small fraction of the cost and time of traditional, consultant-led studies. OPEN works with municipalities, building owners, utilities, and industry partners across Canada to accelerate the pace of building retrofits.
About the OPEN Virtual Home Label
The OPEN Virtual Home Label is a homeowner-facing retrofit roadmap tool that helps residents and cities understand the net-zero readiness of their ground-oriented homes — single-family houses, duplexes, and small multiplexes. The tool was first deployed in 2023 with the City of Saskatoon.
The Virtual Home Label is generated using OPEN’s AI-driven building and energy modelling engine, which combines publicly available home information from tax assessment records with anonymized data from real homes that have gone through the EnerGuide for Homes process. The result is a tool that replicates standard energy model outputs with accuracy, paired with anonymized local retrofit cost data to produce realistic project cost and payback estimates for homeowners.
For municipalities, the Virtual Home Label also provides a city-wide view into which conservation measures show the greatest potential in which homes — helping guide future program design, target outreach, and measure progress over time.
Built on Experience, Tailored to Toronto
OPEN’s Virtual Home Label tool is tailored to meet Toronto’s housing stock, policy context, and homeowner needs. OPEN is working closely with the City staff to provide input on key elements of the work, including modelling assumptions tailored to Toronto’s energy and emissions context, and the connections between the tool and the City’s broader portfolio of residential decarbonization programs.
The collaboration reflects a shared commitment to making decarbonization accessible, affordable, and grounded in the realities of homeowners: recognizing that most retrofit action is voluntary and must be financially responsible to succeed at scale.
Looking Ahead
OPEN and the City of Toronto are now in active development on the Toronto Virtual Home Label. More details on the tool, the homeowner experience, and how Toronto residents can use it will be shared in the months ahead.
Learn More
To learn more about the OPEN Virtual Home Label, visit https://opentech.eco/products/virtual-home-label/.
To explore how OPEN can support a similar program in your municipality or region, get in touch at info@opentech.eco.
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[1] https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/99d0-2023-SBEI-Reportfinal-FINAL-ua.pdf