Flood Insurance Requirements For Mortgage Lenders – First Real Estate Listings Web Site Adds Flood Risk to Listings Millions of real estate listings on Realtor.com now include flood risk information due to climate change. Some real estate sales are slow.
Floodwater surrounds a newly constructed home in Maine in 2018. Realtor.com added flood information to more than 100 million listings on its site. Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images caption
Flood Insurance Requirements For Mortgage Lenders
Floodwater surrounds a newly constructed home in Maine in 2018. Realtor.com added flood information to more than 100 million listings on its site.
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Millions of people rely on websites looking to buy or rent a home. Major sites like Zillow, Redfin, Trulia and Realtor.com have kitchen, bathroom, home estimates and even schools. But these sites do not show buyers if the house will flood while they are living in it.
Now, Realtor.com has become the first site to disclose information about home flood risk and how climate change may increase the risk in the coming decades, which could signal a major shift in consumer awareness of climate threats.
“People are buying property with little knowledge of whether it’s a flood or not,” says Harriet Festing, co-founder of the advocacy group Higher Ground, which connects flood survivors across the country. “It destroys lives.”
However, some websites such as Redfin, Zillow and Trulia have no intention of sharing flood information with their users. Millions of homebuyers are at risk of paying more mortgages that could be affected by a natural disaster over a 30-year mortgage. But some real estate agents say real estate agents don’t want to publish flood information, because it could reduce the value of their homes.
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Realtor.com says every one of the nearly 110 million homes on its site also has flood risk information collected both publicly and privately.
People’s information is about whether the home is in a flood zone, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some homes in a FEMA flood zone are required to have flood insurance, and such policies are expensive because there are so many hazards.
But state flood maps don’t cover the entire country and don’t account for sea level rise or extreme rainfall, conditions driven by climate change that make flooding more likely in the future in many places.
“Unfortunately, FEMA’s inaccurate flood maps and weak or non-existent flood disclosure laws make it very difficult for homebuyers to know a property’s flood risk or flood history,” says Joel Scata, who studies flooding. water to the Natural Resources Defense Council. .
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The lack of reliable flood risk information has led organizations to develop their own studies or purchase private flood models. In recent years, this has meant that insurers, banks and banks increasingly have more scientific information about the flood risk in a given area than the people who live there.
“There are profitable companies and businesses that are taking this data, taking this information, and using it to have an opportunity to buy or sell a home. They are using this more profitably than your everyday American,” says Matt Eby. one of the co-founders of the Private Street Foundation, which has spent the past few years highlighting flood risk across the country to make this information available to the general public. He adds: “This democratization of data is how we like to think about it.”
In June, First Street published flood risk alerts for millions of locations. People can search for an address, ZIP code or city and see current flood conditions, as well as the likelihood of flooding in the next 30 years. It is also possible to compare the new flood analysis with FEMA’s flood designation. Each property in the First Street database is assigned a score between 1 and 10, with 1 being the least vulnerable to flooding and 10 being the most.
Starting today, Realtor.com will publish the statistics along with the FEMA designation of each property’s flood on its website. It does not say whether the area has flooded in the past because such information is not publicly available.
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Home listings on Realtor.com now include flood risk and privacy information. Federal flood maps are used primarily to determine the cost of flood insurance and do not account for the future effects of climate change. Realtor.com hide the word
“It’s really important for buyers to know this,” says Leslie Jordan, vice president of sales at Realtor.com. People who are looking to buy a house should know the real costs of buying and repairing the house, including the cost of insurance and repairs. If flooding is going to be a problem, Jordan says he needs to know about it before submitting.
Disclosure of the flood risk of buildings outside the approved flood plain is essential. About one-third of federal funding for flood survivors goes to people who do not live in flood-affected areas.
Jordan says there are things people can do to protect their homes from flooding, but first they need to know they are at risk. “They can raise their house on stilts,” he says. “They can add a sump pump in the basement. They can install a rain garden outside.”
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The Association of State Floodplain Management has warned that people trying to reduce flood risk should not rely on the Floodplain Risk Model because the model underestimates the flood risk of some properties and compares it to others.
Realtor.com also views flood risk disclosure as a competitive advantage. Jordan says: “When we can be transparent about these things – about all aspects – buyers can trust us as a trusted source to make their home buying decisions.”
For other popular websites, such as Zillow, Redfin and Trulia, discussions about publishing flood risk have come in, but there are no plans to follow suit with Realtor.com. Redfin representatives say the site is discussing how best to put the information on its website.
“There are a number of problems with this,” says Jeff Tucker, chief economist at Zillow. “It’s something that I think, sooner or later, would be a good thing to include.”
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Zillow, through its research team, has conducted its own research on how climate change will affect homes across the country, from floods and wildfires.
“Billions of dollars—a lot of land is at risk, especially from coastal flooding,” Tucker says.
Redfin has also conducted research showing that one-third of buyers want to know about natural disasters before buying a home.
“We don’t want a lack of information to lead to overspending on real estate,” says Taylor Marr, chief economist at Redfin. “This is especially true, some early research has found, among low-income minorities.”
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However, real estate websites say that if they share the risk of flooding, they expect pushback from home sellers who are worried it will make their homes worthless.
“We have to be very careful about how we present information,” says Marr. “Would this reduce the cost of the existing homeowner and save a lot of money?”
Marr says that in a competitive market, Redfin wouldn’t want the threat of a flood to destroy the information most used by prospective buyers.
“If we were to design the entire front page to be vulnerable to flooding, they might not be able to tell how long the journey is, for example,” says Marr.
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Jordan, of Realtor.com, says his team did “extensive user testing” to find out how to report a flood risk. In the end, they decided to put both the FEMA risk and the private flood risk near the top of the list. People who click on it get more information about what flood risk means.
Jordan also points out that anyone can check a property’s flood risk on First Street’s website, which means that information can be part of the real estate transaction whether the home owner knows it or not. “The information will be revealed at a later time,” he says. “It’s good that it’s revealed early.” Flood Map Updates Commercial Flood Insurance Loan Type Commercial Flood Insurance Flood Insurance Sections of National Flood Insurance Plans Disaster Assistance Flood Certificates Flood Insurance Home Rental Insurance Offices Flood Insurance Reasons Realtors Investments homeowners flood insurance Risk Rating 2.0 Types of foundations Title Company Closing Attorney Mortgage Company condo flood insurance
Flood insurance can be confusing for anyone but especially if you don’t deal with it every day. When it comes to mortgage companies it is not uncommon for booksellers to be the only ones who deal with this issue on a daily basis. We want to discuss three things that loan managers should know about flood insurance. Categories of Floods Flood Insurance Options Available Policy Transfers As you can imagine flood insurance can have a big impact.
