New Orleans These days sometimes you just have to pinch yourself in disbelief at the blatant impunity, heedless greed, and stark avarice practiced by some companies and professions willing without morals or mercy to put families in danger, physically and financially, by concealing risk. At least, that’s how I felt looking at the headlines that zinged Zillow, the giant online real estate listing operation, for pulling information of climate risks, whether fire, flooding, or whatever from many of their listings.
The topline of this story is that real estate agents, ignoring any information on climate risk in the future and untroubled by any sense of ethics or responsibilities to the buyer in their total commitment to whatever commission they might extract from the seller, through their associations, led by California, had demanded that Zillow submerge or delete information about flooding, fire, and other risks on a property. It was so blatant that the CEO of the California Regional Multiple Listing Service without any hesitation explained that “Displaying the probability of a specific home flooding this year or within the next five years can have a significant impact on the perceived desirability of that property.” Heck, yeah! You’re darned right that a prospective buyer would surely want to know before buying that there was any chance that they could be up to their asses in water soon after they bought the place with years left on a mortgage and insurance bills rising. Another clueless and tone-deaf Virginia real estate agent was quoted in the same article complaining about the future flood risk because she had sold the same house fifteen years earlier. Sister, the past is not the point. Climate change is real and makes the past irrelevant when it comes to future risks.
Zillow removed the information from “more than one million” listings. In fairness, they continue to put a hyperlink to the risk scores and information, even if that simply washes their hands and puts more due diligence on the potential buyer in what economists cite as asymmetric information, harming the buyers. Zillow to its credit does “not allow sellers to remove climate risk data upon request” while their “competitors Redfin and Realtor.com do.” Unbelievable!
The risk data that realtors want to hide come from First Street. This nonprofit has produced widely published and cited flood maps on current and future risk that factor in climate change where FEMA maps are often not up to date. In our work with Arkansas Grassroots United we have used First Street risk maps to argue for flood warning systems in affected communities in the face of last summer’s tragedy in the Texas hill country. First Street’s “models are built on transparent, peer-reviewed science and the full methodologies are publicly available for anyone to review….”
ACORN finds it crazy to ignore their work, given the life and death risks and financial impact involved without transparency. A potential buyer of an individual property in a risky area may still make the decision to go forward, but they should have the right to be protected as a consumer, so they enter the transaction with their eyes wide open. It’s absurd to believe that real estate agents and their associations want to protect their ability to pull the wool over a potential buyer. There should be no such thing as a right to fleece a buyer, and obscuring or removing information on the risks does exactly that.