A two-year effort to provide Houston-area homebuyers with crucial information about properties has collapsed after realtors abruptly reversed course, the Houston Chronicle reported.

What's happening?

In 2021, the Weather Channel dubbed Houston as "America's flooding capital," citing a "long history of extreme rainfall events" in the region.

Willow Waterhole Greenspace Conservancy said Houston had a "flood problem" that resulted from higher temperatures, aggressive land development, and "topography [that] discourages runoff."

A 2017 article published by NBC News described Houston as "remarkably susceptible to devastating floods." In essence, the area's tendency to flood is hardly a secret.

A team from the Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas spent two years developing a tool for Houston homebuyers that would assign flood risk scores to real estate listings.

At what the Chronicle called the "last minute," however, the Houston Association of Realtors scrapped the yearslong effort, purportedly due to members' fears that flood risk scores could discourage buyers.

Sam Brody is an environmental science professor at Texas A&M University who worked on the tool as the Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas' executive director.

"It came out of nowhere at the very end when we were literally about to go live," a stunned Brody told the Chronicle of the reversal. 

However, HAR spokesperson Bill Baldwin defended the decision.

"We serve [HAR] membership, and that membership overwhelmingly was not prepared to have that information out there," Baldwin conceded, per the Chronicle.

Why is this concerning?

Baldwin's stark admission suggested that HAR's membership understood that flood risk scores might dissuade some buyers and that they overwhelmingly sought to conceal the danger.

What's the most you'd pay per month to put solar panels on your roof if there was no down payment? $200 or more 💰 $100 💸 $30 💵 I'd only do it if someone else paid for it 😎 Click your choice to see results and speak your mind.

Houston is nearly 300 miles away from Kerr County, where devastating flash floods killed 135 people in July. 

Two months later, the Texas Standard reported that after Hurricane Harvey caused dozens of fatalities in 2017, "thousands" of homes were built on Texas floodplains. Experts attributed the development to inconsistent regulations between jurisdictions.

Moreover, buyer diligence is only as good as the underlying information, and the Chronicle said experts have warned of "wildly outdated" federal and state flood risk assessments. 

Just days after summer flooding took the lives of more than two dozen counselors and campers at Camp Mystic, NPR emphasized the role of "outdated" FEMA flood maps.

Worryingly, the HAR isn't the only real estate entity keeping homebuyers in the dark on these risks. In December, the large home sales platform Zillow capitulated to angry sales agents and removed climate risk scores from the platform.

In both cases, real estate agents decided to hide critical risk information from potential buyers, preventing them from accessing relevant data in what is typically the largest and most consequential purchase individuals ever make. 

"Families who buy into these neighborhoods could potentially face rising insurance costs, sinking property values, and just the constant worry that their biggest investment might go underwater in the next big storm," Chronicle reporter Yilun Cheng told the Standard.

What's being done about it?

Wesley Highfield collaborated on the tool and told the Chronicle that flood risk information remained available at no cost on the group's website, BuyersAware.org. 

Broadly, awareness of key climate issues, such as increased flood risk, is critical as weather patterns continue to shift rapidly.

Get TCD's free newsletters for easy tips to save more, waste less, and make smarter choices — and earn up to $5,000 toward clean upgrades in TCD's exclusive Rewards Club.