Potential home buyers are increasingly weighing the environmental threats their homes could face as the effects of climate change intensify across the United States. Eighty percent of buyers now consider climate risks when shopping for a home, according to a 2023 Zillow survey.
To help homeowners navigate that uncertainty, Zillow is adding a climate risk threat score to every for-sale listing on its platform. Data from First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that assesses climate risk, will provide home buyers with scores that measure each property’s susceptibility to flood, wildfire, wind, heat and air quality risks. This information will be available on the Zillow app for iOS and website by the end of this year, while Android users will be able to access the data in early 2025, the company said in a release last month.
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Home buyers will be able to view this data on Zillow in two ways, either by looking at information within individual listings or by checking an interactive, color-coded map. The scores will display each home’s current climate risk, as well as the risk estimates for 15 and 30 years in the future – the most common terms for fixed-rate mortgages. Zillow also plans to offer tailored insurance recommendations to users alongside the risk information.
First Street’s climate risk scores are established through models that measure the likelihood of a climate disaster in a given area and then the potential severity of the event, according to Matthew Eby, the company’s founder and chief executive. The company updates its models each year based on the natural disasters that have unfolded, Eby said.
“This level of transparency is allowing people to choose the level of risk that they find comforting and then make an informed decision,” Eby said. “Will this change the buying experience? Absolutely.”
The Zillow upgrade comes at an uncertain time for home buyers as climate change becomes more extreme. Some of the largest U.S. insurance companies have ended certain disaster protection coverage and raised premiums in response to climate risks, The Washington Post has reported. And more home listings today are affected by major climate risks compared to just five years ago, according to a report from Zillow published last month. Across all new home listings in August 2024, nearly 17 percent were at major risk of wildfire, while nearly 13 percent came with a major risk of flooding, the company said.
This information could be especially valuable given that many states don’t require home sellers to disclose past flood or fire damage to potential buyers, even though more than 300,000 Americans moved to disaster-prone counties last year, The Post previously reported. A 2022 Post analysis of extreme flooding events across the country found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood maps fail to fully inform Americans of their flood risks.
In a 2022 study published by real estate company Redfin, home buyers who had access to property listings that included flood risk information were less likely to view or bid on high-risk homes. That finding indicated a massive information gap for buyers regarding a home’s climate risk, according to some experts.
“The information it provides is beneficial because otherwise, there’s just nothing out there for a home buyer or a renter to learn about the risk that they’re facing,” said Joel Scata, a senior environmental health attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Even if there’s debate over the methods used or the processes used, it’s better than nothing.”
It’s difficult to determine the reliability of many climate risk models because the vast majority are not publicly accessible, said Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who has studied the effects of climate-change-fueled disasters on insurance markets. But since the amount of climate-threat information buyers typically have has been “astonishingly low” for years, any improvement would aid transparency in the industry, he added.
Climate risk modeling experts are still developing the best possible way to measure the probability of flooding, fires and other natural disasters in any given area, notes Jesse Keenan, a professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University. The data provided from consumer-facing models can be “uneven” depending on where a person is house-hunting, because some risks have been studied more extensively in certain regions than others, he said.
“They’re not great,” Keenan said. “Some places they work well, and there’s a lot of places where the uncertainty is greater than the value.”
Still, most prospective home buyers will weigh climate risks early in the hunt, and data on these risks can help flag issues they should investigate further, Keenan emphasized. For example, if a score indicates that a house is at a high risk of flooding, home buyers should talk to neighbors about their experiences or show up to the property on a rainy day.
The tool should signal the start of the information-gathering process about a home’s climate risk, rather than the end, Keys added.
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