Earlier this month, the real-estate listing site Zillow ended a subtle social experiment. In 2024, they began to embed climate risk data directly in their property profiles, scoring a home’s future risks from flood, wildfire, wind, heat, and air quality on a 1-to-10 scale.
Say you are looking for a home in your budget for your growing family, and you find the perfect three-bedroom Cape Cod house — but it’s close to a shoreline. Zillow’s property listing might show that it has a nine out of 10 flood risk score. Depending on your personal risk tolerance, that might rule out the house for you.
Including this information seemed like an obvious move for Zillow. Disasters worsened by warming are contributing to multibillion-dollar damages to homes, and the site’s competitors, such as Redfin, already feature climate risk information in their listings.
“Climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions,” Skylar Olsen, chief economist at Zillow, said in a statement last year.
Zillow’s own data proved that many homebuyers were indeed starting to think more about climate change alongside square footage, nearby schools, and curb appeal — so much so that real estate agencies and sellers complained that the climate risk scores were starting to hurt sales.
Which is kind of the point.
Giving homebuyers a sense of where warming temperatures could lead to a higher chance of a wildfire or flood should ideally steer people away from properties facing greater danger. Over time, people would buy safer homes — and if they chose to buy in riskier areas, at least they were forewarned and could boost their insurance policies.
Key Takeaways
- Real-estate listing site Zillow began including climate disaster risk scores in its property listings last year, but recently removed them after complaints from realtors and sellers that the information was hurting sales.
- This is just one example of how sellers, realtors, and governments have sought to limit the use of risk forecasts that factor in climate change because of the effects on real estate.
- But just because some want to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to climate risk doesn’t mean these dangers will go away.
- Communities that have examined their own risks and taken steps to reduce them have seen benefits. One community near Lake Tahoe managed to reduce property insurance rates after taking steps to reduce wildfire risks.
But climate risk assessments are not great if your current house has a bad score, and you’re trying to sell it. Under pressure from real estate groups, Zillow stopped including them. The climate risks, of course, haven’t gone away.
Welcome to the “la, la, la, can’t hear you” climate era.
In many parts of the US, populations are still increasing in areas vulnerable to disasters such as floods, extreme heat, drought, and fires, while the federal government under President Donald Trump is removing references to climate change from government websites.
People, too, will cover their eyes when the climate reality threatens real estate prices. Clear Lake, Texas, for example, installed signs showing the potential high water mark from storm surge after Hurricane Ike in 2011, but when locals complained that the warnings were hurting sales, the signs were taken down. In 2012, North Carolina outlawed a forecast of sea level rise that showed that many more coastal properties were at risk of flooding over the next century, in favor of adopting a forecast that only looked 30 years ahead.
Yet, while sellers might want to overlook future risks, banks, insurance companies, and buyers don’t want to lose money on what is often their single-most expensive purchase. More costly disaster damages are also taking a bigger bite out of the $55 trillion US residential housing market as a whole.
“I don’t think this is a good thing for anyone but Zillow — people need to know more about their risk, not less,” said Marc Ragin, a researcher studying disaster risk at the University of Georgia, in an email.
Anticipating future threats worsened by climate change is not just about creating warnings, though; they can be useful tools for adapting to climate change. One community that took them seriously actually saved money by lowering their property insurance rates. Here’s how.
What happens when you actually grapple with climate risk
Wildfires regularly confront the communities around Lake Tahoe in Nevada and California. Though the flames rarely make it into neighborhoods, the basin is often bathed in choking smoke from nearby blazes, and residents are starting to realize that it’s only a matter of time before they will face an inferno up close.
The Tahoe Fund, a nonprofit, took an unflinching look at the wildfire risks in the area and launched a pilot project this year to create “the most fire-ready community in Tahoe.” They laid out their process in a playbook for reducing fire risks that they hope any place looking to reduce the odds of homes going up in flames could draw on.
They began with a homeowners association in pine-forested Incline Village, Nevada — home to 9,000 people — where the average home price is $1.4 million. The association, Tyrolian Village, is composed of 228 homes. Using a mix of fire risk models, the Tahoe Fund team identified the areas most primed to burn. The models they used were more sophisticated than those used on real estate sites and more tailored to the community, but it helped the team get more bang for their buck when it came to figuring out what tactics would best improve the neighborhood’s fire resilience.
“Through technology, you don’t necessarily need to do everything,” said Amy Berry, who leads the Tahoe Fund. “You need to do the things that are the most important that are going to have the biggest impact on lowering risk.”
They then reached out to community leaders to set priorities for measures like reducing fuel loads in public areas, building defensible spaces, and making homes more fire-resistant, drawing on public funds and private donations. The pilot project also gave homeowners individual fire risk assessments and to-do lists, offering grants to spur owners of the highest-priority homes to act.
The effort is already starting to produce results. Tyrolian Village saw its home insurance premiums drop by one-third. Berry said that this kind of targeted risk reduction could be applied in many places.
Insurance looms in the background of any discussion of disasters. In California, insurance companies have been dropping customers whose wildfire risks were too hot to handle. In states like Florida and Louisiana, some private insurers have stopped insuring new properties, gone bankrupt, or left the market entirely. The federally backed National Flood Insurance Program is continually losing billions of dollars. So, a project that measurably reduces risks is encouraging.
Yet, there are still many people in the community who are reluctant to grapple with the threats they face. “We emailed everyone. We sent postcards. We said open your reports, so you know what to do, and only 50 of the homeowners have opened their reports,” Berry said.
It’s also important to remember that risk forecasts aren’t guarantees, and climate change isn’t the only factor at play. Plenty of homes that aren’t in established flood zones still flood, while some in high-risk areas have kept their basements dry. The same goes for homes inside and outside high fire-risk zones.
Still, having even a vague sense of where risks to property are higher and lower can be useful for planning things like storm drains and seawalls. Individual homebuyers could start to include climate risk assessments in their home inspections, checking structures for fire-resistant materials and water runoff alongside termite damage and cracks in the foundation.
But, that requires buyers to realize these perils are out there. Past research showed that another driver of real estate prices in vulnerable areas was belief in climate change. Homes in at-risk communities where people took threats of rising temperatures seriously sold for less than in flood zones where residents did not think climate change was a problem.
People also quickly forget the lessons of past disasters, often rebuilding and expanding in an area that’s flooded or burned. And it’s even harder to get people to adapt to things that they’ve never experienced before.
So, while forecasting climate change and adapting to emerging threats are still immense challenges, the biggest hurdle is human behavior, getting people to actually engage with the dangers they face. Hiding this information can only help sellers for a little while before the bill comes due.
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