Major Real Estate Website Now Shows Flood Risk. Should They All?

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Flood waters surround a newly constructed house for sale in Maine in 2018. Realtor.com added flood risk information to the more than 100 million listings on its site.

Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald via Getty

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Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald via Getty

Home listings on Realtor.com now include both federal and private flood risk information. Federal flood maps are primarily used to determine the cost of flood insurance and do not account for the future effects of climate change.

Realtor.com

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Realtor.com

«It’s really important for consumers to know this,» says Leslie Jordan, senior vice president of product at Realtor.com. People who are hoping to buy a house need to know the true cost of purchasing and maintaining the building, including the cost of insurance and repairing damages. If flooding is a potential problem, Jordan says they should know about it before they make an offer.

Disclosing flood risk for homes that are outside the official floodplain is important. About one third of federal disaster money paid out to flood survivors goes to people who do not live in designated flood zones.

Jordan says there are things people can do to protect their homes against floods, but first they need to know that they are at risk. «They can elevate their home on stilts,» she says, «they can add a sump pump into the basement, they can install a rain garden outside.»

The Association of State Floodplain Management warns that people who are trying to mitigate flood risk should not rely solely on the Flood Factor score because the model underestimates flood risk for some properties and overestimates it for others.

Realtor.com also sees flood risk disclosure as a competitive advantage. Jordan says: «The more transparent we can be about these properties — about all the data about them — the more consumers will trust us as a legitimate source to make their home-buying decisions.»

Other websites holding off

For other popular real estate websites, like Zillow, Redfin and Trulia, discussions about publishing flood risk have come up internally, but there are no current plans to follow Realtor.com’s lead.

«There are a number of challenges with that,» said Jeff Tucker, an economist at Zillow. «It’s something that I think, sooner or later, would be a great feature to include.»

Zillow, through its research arm, has run its own analyses about how climate change could take a significant toll on housing nationwide, through both floods and wildfires.

«Hundreds of billions of dollars — just a tremendous amount of real estate at risk, primarily from coastal flooding, for instance,» says Tucker.

Redfin has also done surveys showing that three-quarters of its buyers want information about natural disasters before purchasing a home.

«We don’t want the lack of information to result in millions of dollars of overspending on housing,» says Taylor Marr, lead economist at Redfin. «This is especially true, some preliminary research has found, in low-income minorities.»

Still, the real estate websites say if they share flood risk, they expect pushback from home sellers who are concerned that it makes their home less desirable.

«We need to be very careful about how we provide information,» Marr says. «Could this actually reduce the value of this existing homeowner and essentially take away a lot of their net worth?»

Marr says that in a competitive market, Redfin wouldn’t want flood risk to crowd out the information that’s most heavily used by prospective buyers.

«If we made the whole front page just about flood risk, they might not be as easily able to navigate how long the commute is, for example,» Marr says.

Jordan, of Realtor.com, says her team did «extensive user testing» to figure out how to present flood risk information. In the end, they decided to put both the FEMA risk designation and the private flood risk score near the top of the listing. People who click on it get more detailed information about what the flood risk means.

Jordan also points out that anyone can look up a property’s flood risk on First Street’s website, which means that information could be part of real estate transactions whether current homeowners know about it or not. She says: «The data is going to be figured out at some point. It’s better that it be disclosed at the beginning.»

• Housing
• real estate
• climate change