In September 2024, Zillow added First Street climate risk scores to every for-sale listing in the country. The company's chief economist praised the move, saying "healthy markets are ones where buyers and sellers have access to all relevant data." Fourteen months later, after sustained complaints from the real estate industry that the scores were suppressing sales, Zillow stripped them from its platform entirely.
Around the same time, Connecticut's Insurance Department published the same First Street data at even greater granularity through a free public tool. Same vendor. Same science. Opposite conclusions about what to do with it. The difference comes down to a simple question: does the entity controlling the data make money when homes sell, or when consumers understand what they're buying?