Ed mentioned this yesterday but there’s a lot to it and I found it pretty interesting so here we go with a deeper dive. Zillow is a company that provides real estate listings nationwide. Last year they partnered with a company in New York called First Street to provide climate risk assessments for each individual property. There were complaints, both from individual homeowners and sellers and also from experts in estimating flooding and fire risks. This week, Zillow changed course and dropped the risk scores from its listings.
Zillow, the country’s largest real estate listings site, has quietly removed a feature that showed the risks from extreme weather for more than one million home sale listings on its site.
The website began publishing climate risk ratings last year using data from the risk-modeling company First Street. The scores aimed to quantify each home’s risk from floods, wildfires, wind, extreme heat and poor air quality.
What prompted this appears to be complaints from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service which complained about the accuracy of he models by First Street.
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 chief executive officer…
“When we saw entire neighborhoods with a 50 percent probability of the home flooding this year and a 99 percent 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,” Mr. Carter said.
But it’s not just the companies that make a living off real estate who had doubts about the reliability of First Street’s modeling. Experts in flood modeling told the SF Chronicle earlier this year that the estimates might work for county level risks but not for individual homes.
“Science has not caught up with our demand for climate services to help inform us about specific properties,” said Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University…
“Flooding is probably one of the toughest hazards to get right,” said Brett Sanders, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine. He and his colleagues developed a detailed flood model for Los Angeles that highlighted much higher flood risk than indicated in federally defined floodplains.
In a 2024 study, Sanders and colleagues reported that just 20% of the Los Angeles properties their model identified as having a high risk of flooding overlapped with First Street’s predictions. “If you’re in Compton, your (flood) exposure there is going to be way higher with our model versus the First Street data,” Sanders said.
First Street’s national-scale flood model “seems to get you in the ballpark for what the risk is at the county scale,” Sanders added. “But then trying to say that you can differentiate the risk of one house versus another seems to not be substantiated by these results.”
A retired hydrologist was surprised when he looked up the rating for his own home.
Phillip Zarriello, a retired hydrologist previously with the U.S. Geological Survey, first began questioning the First Street flood risk scores when he was browsing properties on real-estate listing websites and, on a whim, checked his own home, located on top of a hill.
“My house that I still own was rated a seven out of ten risk,” Zarriello said, what First Street describes as a “severe” risk for flooding. “I’ve been here twenty five years and never even had something that came close to a flood risk.”
Zarriello, who has over 40 years of experience as a hydrologist, applied well-established mathematical methods and calculated his home had no risk of flooding, consistent with his experience.
One of the problems with Zillow’s listings is that, unlike other services (like Redfin) Zillow would not allow anyone to remove or challenge the rating provided for their home by First Street. You were just stuck with whatever they came up with even if, as in the case above, you knew the math better than they did.
Ms. 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 one or a two flood risk,” she said.
Zillow does not allow sellers to remove climate risk data upon request. Its competitors Redfin and Realtor.com do.
As of this week, Zillow still provides a link to First Street where you can look up their flood and fire risk estimates, but it doesn’t list those numbers on their own site.
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