Zillow Deleting Home Climate Risk Scores Reveals Limits of Flood, Fire Data

Contributor: What happens when a real estate giant tries to suppress climate-risk data?

Independent models that flagged 94% of homes destroyed in January's fires as facing 'severe' or 'extreme' risks were just quietly removed from Zillow.

Zillow Deleting Home Climate Risk Scores Reveals Limits of Flood, Fire Data

Zillow Drops 'Climate Risk Scores' From Property Listings And The Media Loses It

Zillow ditches faulty climate-risk scores that were dragging down home values and based on unscientific attribution models, sparking a media meltdown.

Zillow removed climate risk scores, because property-level modeling is not foolproof

When Zillow removed climate risk scores from property listings, many assumed the company acted out of political pressure. The main issue though was that the risk models behind the scores were not reliable enough. For Bloomberg, Eric Roston reports: “You have to know something about the individual structure — its foundation, the presence of a basement, first-floor height,” says Howard Botts, chief scientist of Cotality. Each assumption that a mod…