2024 will go down as a tough year for property owners.
According to the federal government, two dozen weather and climate disasters will each have caused more than a billion dollars in damage.
Some homes are at higher risk than others, but it isn’t always obvious.
Some major players in the real estate industry are now offering an easy way to find out the climate risks for individual homes.
Severe flooding in Leominster destroying homes and washed-out beaches threatening property on Cape Cod and the Islands are two local examples of how amplified storms are decimating houses.
Historic wildfires out west are another example of weather conditions wreaking havoc on property.
“Every home has specific risks,” said Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather, Ph.D. “I don’t think there is any home that is risk-free, but at least knowing what risks a home faces can help a homebuyer understand what they’re in for when they’re making an offer on a home.”
Redfin.com along with Zillow.com and Realtor.com are all now adding climate risk assessments for the properties listed on their respective sites.
“You can look up climate risk scores for that home. These include flood factor, fire factor, heat factor, wind factor, and air quality factor,” added Fairweather.
James Heiss, Ph.D., thinks the tools are incredibly helpful. He’s an associate professor at UMass-Lowell and a member of the school’s Climate Change Initiative.
He particularly likes that these websites are looking forward and making projections, not just regurgitating historical data.
“They’re incorporating new data, new climate simulation data, into these flood risk factors to estimate the level of risk that a property might have in 5, 10, 15 years into the future.”
Boston 25 News asked local residents if they think this information is helpful.
“I think it would be,” said one man in Jamaica Plain. “If you’re trying to buy you should definitely assess that kind of information, know what you’re buying, because, you spend $1 million on a home and after one bad storm next year you’re underwater, literally, then you are kind of screwed.”
A woman along Centre Street didn’t think the information was that helpful.
“I was house hunting for literally over a year and I didn’t have too much luck and that is not one of the factors that I was looking into.”
Emily Clark, president of the Cape Cod and Islands Association of Realtors, said climate change is becoming a bigger factor as people buy and sell real estate in that part of the state.
She says more buyers, as well as sellers, are asking questions about climate change and its impact on the housing market.
Still, she feels climate risk factors on national websites should only be a starting point for people getting into the market.
“You can get some general information there, but I would say once you’re identifying where you want to be, at that point, you want to get more local information.”
She says climate risk is not just a one-size-fits-all component but is very property-specific.
“So, when you identify a property, you want to be able to work with your realtor, you want to work with your local lender, you want to work with your insurance company to really identify the different risks that are relevant to that property.”
The insurance issue is particularly important because rates have already soared in places like Florida and Texas.
Even in this region of the country, policies have become pricier in certain areas. It’s important to find out what it would cost to insure any property as that can be the difference between a home that is affordable or one that is out of reach.
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