New Online Database to Give Homebuyers Detailed Information About Flood Risks
Date Posted: January 14, 2020
Posted In: News,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: A climate research organization will offer access to a risk model that predicts the probability of flooding for homes across the United States, giving the public a look at the data institutional investors use to gauge risk.
First Street Foundation on Tuesday launched Flood Lab, a research partnership which provides eight universities with its model that maps previous instances of flooding as well as future risks. Using the dataset, Wharton, MIT and John Hopkins University among others will quantify the impacts of flooding on the U.S. economy.
The move could put pressure on prices of homes, municipal bonds and mortgage-backed securities linked to real estate in risk-prone areas, according to Matthew Eby, executive director of research organization First Street Foundation, and other Flood Lab participants.
The data will be made available to the public in the first half of 2020 in an online database searchable by home address.
About 62 million American homes have a moderate to severe risk of flooding, data analytics firm Verisk has estimated.
Major risk modeling firms like Risk Management Solutions, CoreLogic, AIR Worldwide and KatRisk are currently the sole purveyors of that information, which they sell to big insurers, mortgage lenders and investment firms. But the cost, which can run into seven figures a year, is prohibitive for universities, smaller financial firms and homeowners.