Zillow Removes Fire, Flood, and Storm Risk Data from Listings
▼ Summary
– Zillow has removed climate risk ratings from its property sales listings, a feature that previously forecasted vulnerability to extreme weather.
– The feature used data from First Street to assess risks like floods, wildfires, and extreme heat for individual homes.
– The removal followed complaints from a California listing service (CRMLS) about the accuracy of First Street’s risk models.
– CRMLS argued that displaying specific flood probabilities could negatively impact a property’s perceived desirability.
– Zillow now directs users to First Street’s own website to manually find climate risk scores for properties.
In a significant shift for prospective homebuyers, the popular real estate platform Zillow has quietly removed detailed climate risk assessments from its property listings. This decision eliminates a feature that provided forecasts for flood, wildfire, wind, extreme heat, and air quality risks, which had been powered by data from the modeling firm First Street. The move follows direct complaints about the accuracy of the risk models from a major industry group, fundamentally changing how buyers access this critical environmental information.
The change was implemented earlier this month after the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS) raised concerns. The organization, a key multiple listing service for real estate professionals, argued that the displayed probabilities could unduly influence a property’s market appeal. Art Carter, the CEO of CRMLS, emphasized that showing the likelihood of a home flooding within a given year could dramatically alter its perceived desirability. These complaints prompted Zillow to pull the integrated risk scores directly from its listing pages.
Instead of presenting the data upfront, Zillow now provides a link directing users to the First Street website. There, individuals must manually search for climate risk scores for any specific address. This extra step places the onus on the buyer to seek out the information independently, rather than having it presented alongside other listing details like square footage or school districts. First Street’s models are notable for suggesting that millions more properties face flooding risks than official government estimates indicate, highlighting a potential gap in publicly available data.
This policy reversal underscores the ongoing tension between transparent risk disclosure and real estate market dynamics. For an industry where perception heavily influences value, providing stark probabilistic data about environmental threats presents a complex challenge. The removal of these scores from a dominant platform like Zillow may make it harder for the average consumer to easily factor climate resilience into one of the largest financial decisions of their life, relying instead on their own initiative to research these growing threats.
(Source: The Verge)
