Real estate websites weigh whether to show climate risk data
Original story by Tessa McLean
As climate change intensifies, more homes around the U.S. are becoming vulnerable to extreme weather events. In the South and East, stronger hurricanes batter the coast and trigger flooding and thunderstorms farther inland. In the Midwest, bigger tornadoes and thunderstorms cause devastating damage. And in the West, out-of-control wildfires and extreme heat destroy communities and cause health issues.
Stronger and more frequent wildfires have also led to problems of other kind: a tightening home insurance market. Each year, more California homeowners lose their insurance altogether or have to absorb large premium increases.
To help homeowners make more informed decisions about these risks, real estate websites have begun displaying climate risk data with individual property listings. But the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS), one of the largest in the nation, recently successfully pressured Zillow to remove this data. Zillow’s main competitors – Redfin, Realtor.com, and Homes.com – continue to display the data.
CRMLS claimed that Zillow’s data, which was provided by the risk-modeling company First Street, was not accurate. Matthew Eby, First Street’s founder and CEO, said that the company’s risk data proved highly accurate in 2025’s Los Angeles wildfires. The CRMLS claims and Zillow’s decision, he said, had more to do with the fear that climate data would discourage prospective buyers in an already-tight real estate market.
With support from a Wrigley Institute Faculty Innovation Award, USC economics professor Matthew Kahn conducted a study to test this exact situation. In collaboration with real estate website Redfin and First Street, Kahn and co-investigator Robert Metcalfe explored whether home buyers behaved differently when exposed to property-level climate risk data on the Redfin site. They found that the data did affect buyer behavior, negatively impacting listings for homes with higher risk.
However, Kahn believes it’s better for buyers to see the risk data, even if it’s not perfectly accurate. “This actually helps us to adapt to climate risk,” he said, “because if home buyers are more sophisticated, this gives an incentive to sellers to upgrade their homes in terms of wildfire risk and flood risk.”
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