It’s no longer enough to consider whether you can simply afford a home, or beat out other potential buyers in a bidding war. Now as you deal with a red-hot real estate market, you need to consider how hot the temperature is actually going to get at your future home.
Seattle-based real estate brokerage Redfin is tapping into that concern and adding climate risk information to its home listings.
The feature, powered by ClimateCheck, analyzes the risk of heat, fire, drought and storms over a 30-year period by county, city, neighborhood and zip code.
A Redfin report found that many Americans are considering climate change as they decide where to live. About half of respondents who plan to move in the next year cited extreme temperatures or natural disasters as reasons for relocating. The report found that 80% of respondents would be hesitant to buy a home in places with increased natural disasters.
ClimateCheck’s ratings are based on an area’s future risk and how the risk changes over time. Future risk is calculated by different global climate models which assume a worst-case scenario of CO2 in the atmosphere. The company then localizes the global models with the area’s weather patterns.
It also projects higher risks for areas that are expected to have more changes, as opposed to areas which already are.
The data is available everywhere in the contiguous U.S.
A quick test of the service for an address in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood (above) returned a low risk score of 27 out of 100, with 100 being the most extreme forecasted change.
Hovering over assorted categories returns more explanation of the scoring. The heat risk category, for example, says “a day that reaches 85 degrees F is considered hot for your location. … Normally, you experience about 8 hot days per year. Your forecast in 2050 is about 30 hot days per year. … Your temperature risk (22) is 29% higher than average for people in King County (17).
