Zillow has removed climate risk scores from more than one million home listings, ending a feature that estimated how vulnerable individual properties were to extreme weather. The company made the change after complaints about the accuracy and impact of the ratings, according to a New York Times report.
What Zillow Removed and Why
Zillow, the largest real estate listings site in the United States, began displaying climate risk ratings last year. The company used data from First Street, a risk modeling firm, to assign scores that quantified a home’s exposure to floods, wildfires, wind, extreme heat, poor air quality, and related hazards.
However, the scores drew criticism from real estate agents and homeowners. Agents said the ratings hurt sales, while some homeowners said they could not challenge or appeal the results. Earlier this month, Zillow stopped showing the scores after objections from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, a large private listing database funded by real estate brokers and agents. Zillow relies on that service and other similar platforms nationwide for listing data.
Art Carter, the chief executive officer of the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, said that showing the probability of flooding for a specific home could significantly change how buyers perceived the property’s desirability. The listing service also raised concerns about the accuracy of First Street’s flood risk models. Carter added that the service grew suspicious after seeing neighborhoods labeled with a 50 percent chance of flooding within a year and a 99 percent chance within five years, including areas that had not flooded for 40 to 50 years.
The California Regional Multiple Listing Service has asked other major listing platforms to remove certain flood risk details from their sites as well.
How Zillow Is Handling Climate Risk Information Now
Although Zillow no longer displays climate risk scores directly on listings, it continues to offer access to that information. Zillow now includes hyperlinks to First Street’s website on listing pages. Users can click through to view climate risk scores for individual properties there.
Zillow spokeswoman Claire Carroll said that the company remains committed to providing consumers with information to support informed decisions.
The Broader Industry Context
The removal highlights tension in real estate over how to present climate risk to buyers. Fires, floods, and other disasters increasingly threaten homes as global temperatures rise. Yet, forecasting which specific houses are most vulnerable, and how that vulnerability affects value, remains difficult and controversial.
First Street models suggest that millions more properties face flood risk than government estimates indicate. At the same time, critics question the precision of forward-looking models for individual homes.
Madison Condon, an associate law professor at Boston University who studies climate risk, said that forward-looking models forecast events without historical records for direct comparison. She also noted that even if models provide “good enough” answers for some hazards, the standard for accuracy rises when people rely on them to make large financial decisions about specific properties.
First Street chief executive Matthew Eby said the company builds its models on transparent, peer-reviewed science and publishes full methodologies online. He also said major banks, federal agencies, insurers, and engineering firms have validated the models.
How Similar Data Affects Buyers and Pricing
Other real estate websites, including Redfin, Realtor.com, and Homes.com, display First Street climate risk data alongside ratings for walkability, transportation access, and school quality.
Research cited in the article indicates that climate risk scores can shift consumer behavior. In a Redfin experiment that randomly showed flood risk estimates to 18 million users, viewers who saw the risk data were more likely to search for homes with lower flood risk. The experiment lasted three months. It influenced sales of 8,150 homes listed as high flood risk and reduced their total sales prices by about 1 percent, according to a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research last November.
Zillow’s internal research also found that homes with high fire and flood risk scores were less likely to sell than homes with medium or low scores. However, Zillow did not attribute those sales trends directly to the climate scores.
Disclosure Gaps and Data Limitations
The dispute over modeling occurs alongside uneven disclosure standards. In many states, sellers do not have to disclose whether a house has flooded recently or whether it is vulnerable to wildfires. Meanwhile, some sources buyers do rely on, such as Federal Emergency Management Agency flood maps, have faced criticism for being outdated.
These factors create an environment where third-party hazard models may shape decisions even while stakeholders debate their reliability.
A Case Example From a Listing
The article describes one example in Richmond, Va. Real estate agent Melissa Savenko listed a home last summer and attracted interest from California buyers. After those buyers saw a Zillow flood risk rating of seven out of 10, they canceled plans to visit.
Savenko said she believed the rating was incorrect because nearby homes had much lower flood risk scores. She tried to get Zillow to remove the rating, but Zillow did not allow sellers to opt out of climate risk data. By contrast, competitors Redfin and Realtor.com do allow sellers to remove such data by request.
What This Means for Insurance Professionals
Zillow’s decision reflects how climate risk data can affect market behavior and valuations, even when stakeholders dispute the models. The episode also underscores ongoing challenges in risk communication for individual properties, including the role of private modeling and the limits of existing public maps and disclosure rules.
For insurance industry audiences, the development adds another example of how climate hazard estimates intersect with property markets, consumer decisions, and data governance, while accuracy debates remain central to adoption.
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