[drorco]

Cars have a safety rating, I wonder if houses could have the same kind of rating?

Would it be a better situation if houses for sale/rent will have a transparent safety rating visible to tenants and contractors could choose whether they build expensive, high safety buildings, or cheaper, low safety buildings?

Might sound dystopian, but to me it seems like the preferable solution. I know I live in an old house that would probably not fit for an earthquake, but I also know that if I want to live in a safer house, I'd need to pay more or move to a less desirable location, so I'm OK with taking the risk that an earthquake will kill me while I'm in the house.

The question is whether the market could balance itself enough so contractors don't build just crappy houses and take all the new margin to themselves.

[vasco]

The safety standards are the rating. Someone can build a house for "better than code" and they can advertise that too, but a "rating" here would be the standard that for example a building with X floors needs to follow to ensure it's earthquake resistant, can bear at least Y amoung of weigth, resist to Z winds, etc. The mix of all these things are what become the building standards or "code".

Otherwise to do ratings like you suggest you can only do it to mass produced things, in this case the closest would be mobile homes or prefabs, since you can actually destroy it and see how difficult it was and give it a rating.