Using Predictive Modeling and Climate Change To Kill Property Value

[DBTrek]

You all may know that I'm looking at moving further and further away from Seattle. In fact, I thought I had a house bought this weekend. I signed the contract, the sellers agreed, but then I ran across something new, and it scuttled the deal.

If you're unfamiliar with predictive modeling - it involves taking a large data set, subjecting it to probability trees, and repeating/refining the process until your model makes accurate predictions. It's a little more complex than that, but those are the basic steps. You want to know what crime in your will look like in a decade? Take the crime stats for the past 50 years, weight them to favor recent data, and run a bunch of analytical/probability models on them. Which model took the old data and gave you the most accurate results for today's situation? Refine that model until the results are as close to reality as you can get them. Now have the predictive model project how things will look in ten years. Done.

Well ... some rando "scientist" jackasses decided to "help" home shoppers by creating a website that did this with flood data. Seems legit, right? I mean, flood data is still information, so why not use it to predict flooding for the next thirty years? Ah .... but there's a catch. Climate change. Yep. Notoriously inaccurate, bad-at-predicting-anything, climate science "data" is included in this company's projections. So they aren't using only verifiable data, but also highly speculative climate change predictions. And guess what happens when you take speculative climate change data and treat it like empirical evidence?

You get hundreds of thousands of new homes listed as "high risk" for flooding. I mean, shit, if the ice caps are melting and oceans are rising how many homes are suddenly all but guaranteed to be flooded?

So you can probably figure out what happened with me. The awesome dream home I closed on, which is NOT in a 100 year flood zone according to FEMA, is rated a 9/10 flood risk on this other site. Who cares? Well, Redfin and Realtor.com use this bullshit flood risk site, so anyone looking for homes using them will care. This basically puts a black mark on a home forever, even if it is well outside of an officially recognized 100 year flood zone.

Oh - and as an added bonus - this "scientific site" made to "help" home buyers understand flood risk - recommends that you buy flood insurance, even if your risk is a 1 out of 10. You know ... because they're looking out for you.

[C-Mag]

State DNRC and DEQ determine what is in flood zone and what is not. In fact, you can go to the state Cadastral website and it will tell you if its in the flood zone............... PM me the address of this property

[DBTrek]

State DNRC and DEQ determine what is in flood zone and what is not. In fact, you can go to the state Cadastral website and it will tell you if its in the flood zone............... PM me the address of this property

I appreciate it, but the house is not in a flood zone.
It's about 50 yeards back from one.
But these "scientist" with their climate modelling list the property as a 9/10 flood risk, and that's how the house appears on Redfin and Realtor.com.
So even tho it's not in a flood zone, everyone looking to buy houses on those sites will see it listed in bold red as a 9/10 Flood Risk - which means I'll get fewer buyers and lower offers down the road.


I can send the addy if you just want to check it out to see what I'm talking about tho.

[C-Mag]

Trust the Science