The real estate industry has noticed this. Quite coincidentally, as Hurricane Helene approached the Southeast last week, Zillow announced a fresh feature which displays a climate risk assessment on offer pages alongside interactive maps and insurance requirements. Now you can search for an address and check the risk of flooding, extreme temperatures and fires for that property on a scale of 1 to 10, based on data provided by climate risk modeling firm First Street. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, launched its own climate risk index based on First Street data from earlier this year.
Fresh climate risk assessments on Zillow and Redfin provide no assurance that you will be affected by a natural disaster if you move into any home. However, it is a tool that can assist you decide how you want to insure your property and consider its long-term value.
It’s almost fitting that Zillow and Redfin, platforms designed to assist people find their perfect home, are doing the work to show that climate risk is not binary. There are no completely risk-free homes for the same reasons that there is no perfect climate paradise.
Climate risk is a complicated equation that complicates the already tough and sophisticated calculations of purchasing a home. Better access to risk data could be helpful, and a bit more transparency around the insurance aspects of home ownership is particularly useful as the industry struggles to adapt to our warming world and the disasters associated with it.
“As we see the cost of insurance rising, all of this is starting to impact affordability.” Skyler OlsenZillow’s chief economist told me. “This will help the housing market become a much healthier place where buyers and sellers understand these risks and then have the capabilities to address them.”
That said, knowing about the risks doesn’t stop people from moving around to disaster-prone parts of the country right now. People move to fresh parts of the country for a myriad of different reasons, including the area’s natural beauty, job prospects, and affordable housing. These are several reasons why high risk counties across the country are developing faster than low-risk countieseven in the face of future climate catastrophes that are both unpredictable and inevitable. Knowing how to properly prepare for a worst-case scenario is almost unimaginable.
“The scale of these events we are seeing is beyond anything humanity has ever seen,” he said Vivec Shandasprofessor of urban planning at Portland State University. “No matter what level of readiness and infrastructure we consider sustainable, we will continue to see cracks and failures.”
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build sea walls Or find new ways to fight fires. In a sense, we have the opportunity to create our own climate paradises, making cities more resilient to the threats they face. We can be positive about this future.