Hello and welcome. This is Nolan with DiscoverNCHomes and Nolan’s News. As always, thank you for having me. I wanted to talk today again about the flood risk on Realtor.com. It may be possibly questionable information that they’re putting out there.
Realtor.com will assess flood risk at a 1 – 10 level, one being a less severe, ten being the most. And they’ll also say it’s a maximum or a high flood risk. Something recently came to my attention. We have a property that’s listed and it’s in what’s called a flood zone X. And again, just a quick refresher, an X zone is the best type of flood zone you can be here on the coast. It is a 500 year flood plane. And if you have a mortgage with a bank or a lender, flood insurance is not mandatory, you can hold it of course, but the lender does not require you to have it. So this isn’t a flood zone X and it was listed as a high risk, a 6 out of 10, which is a fairly significant risk factor!
So again, just possibly questionable information. I reached out to realtor.com. Unfortunately it took many, many attempts, but finally I did get someone, a very nice person on the other end who was actually very helpful. She just shared with me that they use a third party to assess what this flood risk is. It is not CaMa, which is fine, as CaMa kind of is our benchmark. Our end all be all. CaMa is an acronym for the Coastal Area Management Act. They are the ones who determine the flood lines. They determine whether a home or a home site is in an X or an AE or whatever type of flood zone it’s in.
So the information Realtor.com is using is not coming from CaMa. But the very nice person I talked told me that ultimately, they can’t change the information, but they did relay to me that they could simply take the information out. So point of this is if you see something on Realtor.com that you may not agree with the information that’s being put out there, supposedly you can get in touch with Realtor.com. – again, took a few attempts, but they were very nice. Once we got there they said “we could get this information removed.” And to me, that is important, as well to my client, very important, because we feel like that this possibly questionable information may deter buyers from something that is a flood zone X, non-flood zone, according to CaMa, but yet it’s being marketed otherwise on Realtor.com.
So just a quick tidbit there. If you want any help with this, or if you have any questions, please let us know. But at least they’re out there and willing to help and get the information removed if we think that it may not be accurate. As always, thank you for having me. We’ll talk to you soon.
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About Nolan Formalarie
Nolan Formalarie has been in the North Carolina Real Estate Industry for over 8 years and enjoys every minute of it. He is involved in every aspect of the industry including selling and purchasing residential property, home watch services, property management, association management and construction.
