Even as exposure to floods, fire and extreme heat increases across the United States, one of the most visible tools for home shopping has made those dangers harder to see. After climate risk scores vanished from millions of listings, a California scientist who helped shape the state’s climate research is now trying to put that information back in front of buyers. The fight over those erased scores is quickly becoming a test of whether the housing market will treat climate risk as essential data or an optional extra.
The backlash that scrubbed climate risk from home search
When climate scores first appeared next to property photos on Zillow, they promised to make flood, fire and heat exposure as legible as square footage. The scores drew on models from the climate analytics startup First Street, which estimates long term risks from flooding, wildfire, sea level rise and extreme heat at the parcel level. But as those scores began flagging homes as high risk, agents and brokers complained that buyers were walking away and that the models were too pessimistic about certain neighborhoods, particularly in The California markets that rely heavily on coastal and wildfire exposed properties, according to reporting on First Street.
The pressure campaign intensified after the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, described as the dominant database for agents in the country’s largest housing market, raised formal concerns about the accuracy and liability implications of those flood risk models. That push culminated when the California Regional Multiple Listing Service urged that climate scores be removed from a consumer facing site, a move detailed in an opinion analysis of how a real estate giant tried to suppress climate risk data Last month. In response to that backlash, Zillow has now removed detailed climate risk data from its U.S. listings, reversing a major initiative and replacing the on page scores with a subtle link out to its data partner, a shift that one trade focused report warned could leave buyers physically and financially exposed to future disasters Zillow.
Neil Matouka’s push to rebuild erased climate scores
Into that vacuum stepped Neil Matouka, a California climate expert who previously managed the development and launch of California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment, a statewide research effort that synthesizes climate science for policymakers. Drawing on that Assessment experience, Neil Matouka is now developing a project that would restore climate risk scores that Zillow deleted, with a focus on making flood, fire and extreme heat exposure visible again for ordinary buyers who may never click through to a separate technical site, according to detailed reporting on his work in Jan that describes how he is trying to rebuild a popular tool for evaluating risk even after it was stripped from listings Neil Matouka. I see his effort as an attempt to translate the state’s high level climate Assessment work into something as concrete as a number on a listing page.
The stakes are not abstract. Even as exposure to floods, fire and extreme heat increase in the face of climate change, a popular tool for evaluating risk has disappeared from the place where most buyers start their search, a dynamic that Jan reporting captured by noting that Even as those hazards rise, the scores have been deleted from a site that once put them front and center Most Popular. By trying to restore those scores, Matouka is effectively arguing that climate risk belongs alongside price history and school ratings, not buried in a separate portal. His work also highlights how state level climate Assessment efforts can be translated into consumer tools, a bridge that could matter far beyond California as other regions confront similar gaps in disclosure Fifth Climate Change.
Real estate’s quiet war over what buyers get to know
Behind the technical debate over models sits a more basic question about who controls information in the housing market. Industry research into climate disclosure has already shown that when buyers are presented with flood risk data, they respond: one Dec analysis of transactions found an average decline of 1 percent in sales price for properties purchased by buyers who were shown flood risk data, and it also noted that climate exposure is rarely spelled out in a Transfer Disclosure Statement, or TDS, by a seller broker, even in high risk areas Furt. That price impact helps explain why some agents saw the on page climate scores as a direct threat to their commissions and why they pressed so hard to get them removed from a consumer facing site, a campaign that culminated in the California Regional Multiple Listing Service’s intervention described in detail in a Dec opinion piece on how climate risk data was suppressed California Regional Multiple.
More from Morning Overview