2024 will go down as a tough year for property owners. According to the federal government, two dozen weather and climate disasters will each have caused more than a billion dollars in damage. Some homes are at higher risk than others, but it isn’t always obvious. Some major players in the real estate industry are now offering an easy way to find out the climate risks for individual homes. Severe flooding in Leominster destroying homes and washed-out beaches threatening property on Cape Cod and the Islands are two local examples of how amplified storms are decimating houses. Historic wildfires out west are another example of weather conditions wreaking havoc on property. “Every home has specific risks,” said Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather, Ph.D. “I don’t think there is any home that is risk-free, but at least knowing what risks a home faces can help a homebuyer understand what they’re in for when they’re making an offer on a home.” Redfin.com along with Zillow.com and Realtor.com are all now adding climate risk assessments for the properties listed on their respective sites. “You can look up climate risk scores for that home. These include flood factor, fire factor, heat factor, wind factor, and air quality factor,” added Fairweather. James Heiss, Ph.D., thinks the tools are incredibly helpful. He’s an associate professor at UMass-Lowell and a member of the school’s Climate Change Initiative. He particularly likes that these websites are looking forward and making projections, not just regurgitating historical data. “They’re incorporating new data, new climate simulation data, into these flood risk factors to estimate the level of risk that a property might have in 5, 10, 15 years into the future.” Boston 25 News asked local residents if they think this information is helpful. “I think it would be,” said one […]
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