Realtor.com includes wildfire risk in listings

Last week, the real estate listing giant said it would display the risk of a home being damaged in a wildfire over the next thirty years in its listings. The data comes from the First Street Foundation and the U.S. Forest Service.

Why should we care?
Realtor.com is the second most popular listing site in the U.S., and it’s the first to display property-specific and scientifically driven wildfire risk information. “This information is available for free to help home shoppers make informed decisions and to empower homeowners to protect their properties,” said Sara Brinton, the proptech’s Lead Project Manager. Realtor.com seems to have rolled out its new feature for both moral and economic reasons. For one, the company wants to ensure full transparency in the home-buying process—including the risks of certain geographies due to climate change over others. And, from a moneymaking perspective, these risk indicators may encourage developers to include more wildfire-resilient materials in their constructions, or even move their projects to geographies less prone to wildfires, which can contribute to a major shift in where homes are built in the United States. (A more cynical take also says that Realtor.com would see less business if fewer homes remained standing in the wake of wildfires.) We should expect other proptechs to transparently foreground the risks of climate change in their information pipelines and business models in the coming years. Realtor.com is just the canary in the coal mine.