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A growing fight over climate risk data is reshaping the U.S. housing market, pitting home sellers, buyers and real estate platforms against private disaster modelers, The Wall Street Journal writes.
For years, listing sites prominently displayed risk scores from First Street, a leading climate analytics firm that grades individual homes on vulnerability to flooding, wildfire, wind, heat and air quality. But backlash from agents and sellers—who say the ratings depress prices and are sometimes inaccurate—has pushed Zillow to remove the scores from its listings, while Redfin and Realtor.com now allow sellers to opt out or limit how the data appears.
Buyers, meanwhile, increasingly want this information as climate-driven disasters become more frequent and unpredictable, especially as insurers already rely on similar models to set coverage and premiums.
Critics say First Street’s hyper-local predictions can be misleading and vary sharply from other tools such as HazardHub or ClimateCheck. The dispute underscores a broader gap between outdated government hazard maps and a fast-growing private market for climate risk modeling that is now influencing billions of dollars in real estate transactions.
