NPR

Major Real Estate Website Now Shows Flood Risk. Should They All?

Millions of home listings on Realtor.com now include information about climate change-driven flood risk. But other real estate sites are holding off.
Flood waters surround a newly constructed house for sale in Maine in 2018. Realtor.com added flood risk information to the more than 100 million listings on its site.

Millions of people rely on real estate websites when they're hoping to buy or rent a home. Major sites like Zillow, Redfin, Trulia and Realtor.com feature kitchens, bathrooms, mortgage estimates and even school ratings. But those sites don't show buyers if the house is likely to flood while they're living there.

Now, Realtor.com has become the first site to disclose information about a home's flood risk, and how climate change could increase that risk in the coming decades, potentially signaling a major shift in consumers' access to information about climate threats.

"People are buying property with little knowledge of whether it's going to flood or not," says Harriet Festing, co-founder of the advocacy group , which connects people across the country who have

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