According to Bloomberg Business, Zillow removed climate risk scores from its home listings last month after facing industry criticism. The real estate platform had been using third-party data to flag risks like flooding and wildfires for potential buyers. Critics, including environmental groups, warned that hiding this information leaves homebuyers in the dark about very real dangers. The real estate industry, however, argued the scores were often inaccurate and unfairly depressed property values. The data, while more advanced than old federal flood maps, is still imperfect, with different scientific models frequently producing conflicting risk projections for the same property.
Zillow’s Impossible Position
So Zillow was stuck. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Provide the risk data and get sued by sellers and agents for scaring off buyers with what might be an overstated probability. Remove the data and get pilloried by consumer advocates and climate groups for obscuring a critical, long-term financial and safety factor. Their core business is facilitating transactions and generating leads for agents. Anything that adds friction or uncertainty to that process is a direct threat to their revenue model. Can you blame them for choosing the path of least resistance? Probably not from a pure business standpoint. But it’s a terrible look that basically says, “We’d rather not know, and you shouldn’t either.”
The Messy Reality of Risk Models
Here’s the thing Bloomberg’s report nails: the data itself is the root problem. We’re not talking about a single, authoritative source of truth. We’re talking about a bunch of smart people running different climate models and different hydrological models, fed with different assumptions, which spit out different results for the same patch of land. One model might say your dream home has a 2% annual chance of flooding. Another might say it’s 8%. That’s a massive difference for a 30-year mortgage! This inconsistency makes the data legally and commercially toxic. It’s hard to build a trustworthy consumer product—or set a price—on a foundation that squishy.
Who Benefits From The Fog?
And let’s be clear about who wins when this data is ambiguous or removed. It’s not the homebuyer. It’s everyone in the chain who profits from the transaction right now and isn’t on the hook in 15 years when the basement floods for the third time. Sellers, real estate agents, mortgage brokers—their incentive is to close the deal at the highest possible price today. Long-term climate risk is someone else’s problem. This whole debate reveals a massive market failure. We’re asking a for-profit listing platform to be a public watchdog, which it will never be. The solution, if there is one, likely requires more standardized, government-backed assessments that carry legal weight. Until then, caveat emptor is the only real rule. Buyer beware, because apparently, even the tech giants with all their data can’t really tell you what you’re buying.
