Realtor.com Becomes 1st RE Website To Rate Flood Risk, Including Future Sea Level Rise
EDIT
The lack of reliable federal information about future flood risk has led corporations to either do their own studies or purchase private flood models. In recent years, that has meant that developers, insurers and banks increasingly have more detailed scientific information about flood risk in a given neighborhood than the people who live there.
"There's for-profit companies and commercial actors that are taking this data, taking this knowledge, and using it to have an advantage to buy or sell homes. They're using this at an advantage over your everyday American," says Matt Eby, one of the co-founders of the private First Street Foundation, which has spent the last few years modeling flood risk across the country in order to make such information available to the general public. He adds: "A democratization of this data is how we like to think about it."
In June, First Street published nationwide flood risk information for millions of properties. People can search for an address, a zip code or a city and see how likely it is to flood now, and how likely it is to flood in the next 30 years. It's also possible to compare the new flood analysis to FEMA's flood designation. Each property in the First Street database is assigned a score between 1 and 10, with 1 being the least flood risk and 10 being the most.
Beginning today, Realtor.com will publish those scores alongside FEMA's flood designation for every property on their site. It does not say whether the property has flooded in the past because such information is not publicly available.
EDIT
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/26/905551631/major-real-estate-website-now-shows-flood-risk-should-they-all
= new reply since forum marked as read
