Zillow, the largest US real estate listing site, has removed a feature that allowed people to see a property’s exposure to the climate crisis, following complaints from the industry and some homeowners that it was hurting sales.
Last September, the online real estate market introduced a tool that shows the individual risk of fire, flood, extreme heat, wind and poor air quality for one million listed properties, explaining that “climate risks are now a critical factor in home buying decisions” for many Americans.
Related: US homeowners in disaster-prone states face increased insurance costs
But Zillow has now deleted that climate index following complaints from real estate agents and some homeowners that the ranking appeared arbitrary, could not be challenged and was hurting home sales. The complaints included those from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which oversees a database of property data that Zillow relies on.
Zillow said it remains committed to helping Americans make informed decisions about properties, with the listings now containing links to the website of First Street, the nonprofit climate risk quantifier that provided Zillow’s on-site tool.
Matthew Eby, founder and chief executive of First Street, said removing information about climate risk meant many buyers would be “flying blind” in an era when the effects of worsening extreme weather are distorting the US housing market.
“Risk doesn’t go away, it just shifts from a pre-purchase decision to a post-purchase liability,” Eby said. “Families discover after a flood that they should have purchased flood insurance, or discover after selling that wildfire insurance is unaffordable or unavailable in their area.
“Access to accurate risk information before a purchase is not only useful; it is critical to protecting consumers and preventing lifelong financial consequences.”
Eby argued that the push to ditch Zillow’s First Street ratings is tied to a challenging real estate environment, with a lack of affordable housing and repeated weather-related disasters prompting insurers to raise premiums or even flee states like California.
“All of this adds pressure to close sales however possible,” he said. “Climate risk data has not suddenly become inconvenient. It has become harder to ignore in a stressed market.”
As the US, along with the rest of the world, has warmed from burning fossil fuels, worsening extreme weather events have taken a direct toll on people’s homes as well as other infrastructure.
Last year, disasters likely amplified by the climate crisis caused $182 billion in damage, one of the highest on record, according to a government database, since the Trump administration was taken offline.
As a consequence of these increasing risks, the home insurance required for buyers to obtain a mortgage is becoming rarer and more expensive in much of the US. These changes buck an opposite trend in which more Americans are moving to places like Florida and the Southwest, which are increasingly affected by threats like devastating hurricanes and punishing heat waves.
But attributing climate risks to individual properties has been controversial in the real estate industry, as well as among experts who have questioned whether such judgments can be made at such a granular level.
Warnings of such dangers deterred some buyers, especially if the house was particularly expensive anyway. Last year, a sprawling Florida mansion went up for sale for $295 million, making it the most expensive property in the country and in a place also ranked as one of the most at risk of flooding in the US. After several reductions in the asking price, the home was taken off the market.
Jesse Keenan, an author and climate risk management expert at Tulane University, said many scientists and economists have argued that “proprietary risk models that provide highly uncertain assessments can have the perverse effect of undermining public confidence in climate science.”
“There has been a growing bipartisan recognition that government should play a more active role in supporting and standardizing property risk assessment,” Keenan said. “At the same time, science is limited in its ability to evaluate property-by-property valuations.
“I don’t think this is a sign that the brokerage industry is trying to hide climate risks,” he added. “Brokerage firms know that they cannot stop the transmission of information on climate risks because the effects of climate are already being widely felt in the sector.”
Eby defended First Street’s methods and accuracy, stressing that the models used are built on peer-reviewed science and validated against real-world outcomes.
“So when it is claimed that our models are inaccurate, we ask for evidence,” he said. “To date, all empirical validation shows that our science works as designed and provides better risk insight than the tools industry has relied on in the past.”