Zillow, the country’s largest real estate listings site, has quietly removed a feature that showed the risks from extreme weather for more than 1 million home sale listings on its site.
The website began publishing climate risk ratings last year using data from risk-modeling company First Street. The scores aimed to quantify each home’s risk from floods, wildfires, wind, extreme heat and poor air quality.
But real estate agents complained they hurt sales. Some homeowners protested the scores and found there was no way to challenge the ratings.
Earlier this month Zillow stopped displaying the scores after complaints from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which operates a private database funded by real estate brokers and agents. Zillow relies on that listing service and others around the country for its real estate data. The California listing service, one of the largest in the country, raised concerns about the accuracy of First Street’s flood risk models.
“Displaying the probability of a specific home flooding this year or within the next five years can have a significant impact on the perceived desirability of that property,” said Art Carter, California Regional Multiple Listing Service’s CEO.
In a statement, Zillow spokesperson Claire Carroll said the company remains committed to providing consumers with information that helps them make informed decisions. Real estate listings on Zillow now display hyperlinks to First Street’s website, and users can click through to view climate risk scores for a specific property.
The development highlights a growing tension within the real estate industry. Fires, floods and other disasters are posing more risks to homes as the planet warms, but forecasting exactly which houses are most vulnerable — and might sell for less — has proved fraught.
First Street models have shown that millions more properties are at risk of flooding than government estimates suggest.
Other real estate sites, including Redfin, Realtor.com and Homes.com display similar First Street data alongside ratings for factors like walkability, public transportation and school quality.
When researchers randomly displayed these flood risk estimates to 18 million people browsing Redfin, those who saw the feature were more likely to search for homes with low flood risk, according to a working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research last November.
The Redfin experiment, which lasted for three months, affected sales of 8,150 properties that were listed as being at high risk of flooding and reduced their total sales prices by about 1% of their value, according to the paper.
Zillow’s own research has found that homes with high fire and flood risk scores were less likely to sell than homes with medium or low scores, though it did not attribute the sales trends to the climate risk scores.
The California Regional Multiple Listing Service has asked the other large real estate listing platforms to remove certain details about flood risks from their listings.
“When we saw entire neighborhoods with a 50% probability of the home flooding this year and a 99% probability of the home flooding in the next five years, especially in areas that haven’t flooded in the last 40 to 50 years, we grew very suspicious,” Carter said.
In many states, sellers are not required to disclose information about whether a house has flooded recently or if it is vulnerable to wildfires. Other sources of data, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood maps, have been criticized for being out of date.
“With forward-looking models, we can’t check their outputs against a record, they are necessarily forecasting events that have not yet happened,” said Madison Condon, an associate law professor at Boston University who has studied climate risk.
“The First Street models might provide a good enough answer for certain questions or certain hazards,” she said. “But what level of accuracy is good enough changes substantially if the question is about one specific property you are about to spend your life savings on.”
In a statement Matthew Eby, First Street’s CEO said, “Our models are built on transparent, peer-reviewed science and the full methodologies are publicly available for anyone to review on our website.” He added that the company’s models have been validated by major banks, federal agencies, insurers and engineering firms.
When Melissa Savenko, a real estate agent, listed a home in Richmond, Virginia, for sale last summer, she said it immediately sparked interest from buyers in California, who made plans to hop on a plane to see the property.
But then the buyers saw the Zillow listing with a flood risk rating of 7 out of a maximum risk of 10. They canceled their plans.
Savenko, who knows the neighborhood and sold the same house 15 years earlier, thought the flood risk rating was a mistake. She tried to get Zillow to remove it.
“It made no rational, logical sense whatsoever that this one house was tagged with this crazy flood risk and houses around it had a 1 or a 2 flood risk,” she said.
Zillow does not allow sellers to remove climate risk data upon request. Its competitors Redfin and Realtor.com do.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
