Comment: Zillow axing climate risk data doesn’t elimate risk

Published 1:30 am Thursday, December 4, 2025

By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion

We live in a golden age of magical thinking, and I’m not just talking about the trillions of dollars being burned on artificial intelligence. When it comes to our rapidly heating planet and its effects on our future, too many of us have adopted a strategy of simply ignoring reality to make it go away.

Consider the news that listings on the real estate site Zillow will no longer include climate-risk ratings from the private data firm First Street. The ratings scored each home on its likelihood of being affected by wildfires, floods, high winds, extreme heat and air pollution. As reported by the New York Times, the decision follows complaints by homeowners and real estate agents that the listings were hurting sale prices.

“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,” Art Carter, chief executive officer of the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, a private database for real estate brokers and agents, told the Times.

Well, yeah. And maybe it should? A house is by far the biggest financial investment most people will ever make. Just an inch of water can do $25,000 of damage, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Personally, if I’m about to drop the GDP of a small nation on shelter for my family, I kind of want to know whether that shelter stands a good chance of being knee-deep in water, or on fire, in the near future.

I’m not alone. Homebuyers are increasingly seeking out climate information when making this important decision. Most buyers need home insurance to obtain a mortgage, and properties at greater risk of climate disasters typically face higher insurance premiums. Meanwhile, few private insurance policies cover floods. All of this naturally hurts the value of at-risk homes, even without Zillow getting involved.

This isn’t a future problem but a right-now problem. Flood-prone U.S. counties had a net out-migration of nearly 30,000 people last year, according to the real estate site Redfin (which still uses First Street climate scores on its listings). Relatively less-soggy counties enjoyed net inflows of nearly 36,000 people. A recent study by economists at the Richmond Federal Reserve found that homes at the greatest risk of sea-level rise already sell for 6 percent less, on average, than homes on higher ground.

Realtor complaints about First Street climate scores come in the context of the industry being salty about all kinds of data on Zillow and other popular listing sites, including the length of time properties sit on the market, price history and crime statistics, Housingwire reported. All of this is useful information to a prospective buyer but bad for sellers, Robert Reffkin, CEO of the brokerage firm Compass Inc., grumbled in an earnings call last year. Compass offers an alternative listing service that excludes many of these inconvenient numbers.

For context in the other direction, it is legitimate to wonder about the accuracy of First Street’s flood data. A Bloomberg Green investigation last year compared the company’s flood-modeling output for Los Angeles County with the product of a University of California at Irvine model and found the two agreed just 21 percent of the time. First Street disagreed with those findings. But this isn’t particularly reassuring for homebuyers. Nor does it help that, in order to get detailed analysis of your risks, you have to pay First Street for the information.

Still, the answer is not to ignore the issue altogether, as home sellers, agents and brokers would apparently like us to do. The optimal solution would be for FEMA to at long last update its own flood maps, which are publicly available but have vastly underestimated the real risks for years.

Since 1998, 40 percent of all flood-insurance claims come from outside FEMA’s high-risk zones, or those with a 1 percent risk of flooding every year, according to the agency. Obtaining a mortgage in those zones requires flood insurance, which typically means going through FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, which is chronically underfunded and politically challenged.

In some spots, FEMA’s flood-map performance is even worse. The Miami Herald recently studied a decade of flood data for Miami-Dade County and found 60 percent of floods occurred outside of FEMA’s high-risk zones. Overall, just 4 percent of Americans have flood insurance despite 99 percent of counties flooding since 1998. This is a key factor in this country’s crisis of underinsurance against climate risks, with some $2.7 trillion in home values potentially at risk, according to investor Dave Burt.

In a parallel universe, an attentive White House and Congress would be jumping to make more and better climate-risk information available. In our grim timeline, President Donald Trump and the real-world Congress are engaging in their own magical thinking. Climate change is a hoax, according to this worldview, and any acknowledgment of that reality is anathema.

Therefore, Trump has gutted FEMA, putting increasingly unqualified people in charge of it while musing about destroying it. Trump has also eliminated FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, which helped people brace for floods and prevent future damage. Trump’s energy policy, meanwhile, aims for “energy dominance” while starving the country of the world’s fastest-growing energy technologies. As a result, he’s ceding 21st-century global energy dominance to China.

Just as risk-less home listings magically cater to people trying to sell you houses, climate-less energy and environmental policies cater to people trying to sell you oil, coal and gas. Buyer beware.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.