If you’re looking to purchase a home, it might be important to consider potential environmental threats.
Zillow is adding a climate risk threat score to every home listing on its platform, the Washington Post reported.
According to a Zillow survey in 2023, 80% of buyers now consider climate risks when shopping for a home as the effects of climate change intensify nationwide.
The scores will be available on Zillow for iOS and the Zillow website by the end of the year, and they will be available for Android users in early 2025, Zillow said in a release.
“Data from First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that assesses climate risk, will provide home buyers with scores that measure each property’s susceptibility to flood, wildfire, wind, heat and air quality risks,” the Post reported.
The data will be able to be viewed in two different ways: by looking at individual listings or by looking at an interactive, color-coded map, and users will also be able to access tailored insurance recommendations to go along with the risk information.
“The scores will display each home’s current climate risk, as well as the risk estimates for 15 and 30 years in the future — the most common terms for fixed-rate mortgages,” the Post reported.
Matthew Eby, First Street’s founder and chief executive, said to the Post that the climate risk scores will be established through models that measure the likelihood of a climate disaster in a given area, as well as the potential severity of it. The models are updated yearly based on natural disasters as they unfold, according to Eby.
The company updates its models each year based on the natural disasters that have unfolded, Eby said.
“This level of transparency is allowing people to choose the level of risk that they find comforting and then make an informed decision,” Eby said to the Post. “Will this change the buying experience? Absolutely.”
Approximately 70% of home buyers and sellers use Zillow at some point in their transaction, according to the Zillow website.
But is the climate risk data accurate? Climate experts are unconvinced, Heatmap News reported.
“Few experts believe that tools like First Street’s are capable of actually modeling the dangers of climate change at a property-by-property level,” the site said.
A White House scientific advisers team report concluded last year that these models are of “questionable quality,” and a Bloomberg investigation found that different climate risk models could return wildly different catastrophe estimates for the same property, according to Heatmap News.
“Not all of First Street’s data is seen as equally suspect,” Heatmap News said. “Its estimates of heat and air pollution risk have generally attracted less criticism from experts. But its estimates of flooding and wildfire risk — which are the most catastrophic events for homeowners — are generally thought to be inadequate at best.”
