Zillow’s short-sighted move to overlook climate risk |
Earlier this month, the real-estate listing site Zillow ended a subtle social experiment. In 2024, they began to embed climate risk data directly in their property profiles, scoring a home’s future risks from flood, wildfire, wind, heat, and air quality on a 1-to-10 scale.
Say you are looking for a home in your budget for your growing family, and you find the perfect three-bedroom Cape Cod house — but it’s close to a shoreline. Zillow’s property listing might show that it has a nine out of 10 flood risk score. Depending on your personal risk tolerance, that might rule out the house for you.
Including this information seemed like an obvious move for Zillow. Disasters worsened by warming are contributing to multibillion-dollar damages to homes, and the site’s competitors, such as Redfin, already feature climate risk information in their listings.
“Climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions,” Skylar Olsen, chief economist at Zillow, said in a statement last year.
Zillow’s own data proved that many homebuyers were indeed starting to think more about climate change alongside square footage, nearby schools, and curb appeal — so much so that real estate agencies and sellers complained that the climate risk scores were starting to hurt sales.
Which is kind of the point.
Giving homebuyers a sense of where warming temperatures could lead to a higher chance of a wildfire or flood should ideally steer people away from properties facing greater danger. Over time, people would buy safer homes — and if they chose to buy in riskier areas, at least they were forewarned and could boost their insurance policies.
Key Takeaways
Real-estate listing site Zillow began including climate disaster risk scores in its property listings last year, but recently removed them after complaints from realtors and sellers that the information was hurting sales. This is just one example of how sellers, realtors, and governments have sought to limit the use of risk forecasts that factor in climate change because of the effects on real estate. But just because some want to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to climate risk doesn’t mean these dangers will go away. Communities that have examined their own risks and taken steps to reduce........