Your Chicago Home Already Has a Flood Score. You Just Can't See It on Zillow Anymore.

There are four words that can take a Chicagoland deal from "we love it" to "we're withdrawing" faster than anything else in this business:

Water in the basement.

Every homeowner from Wilmette to Tinley Park knows the drill. The sky opens up, you hear a noise from the floor drain that no floor drain should ever make, and you spend the next six hours in rubber boots negotiating with a shop vac. Then you dry it out, you fix it, you move on, and you never think about it again.

Except now there's a website that thinks about it for you. And it assigns your house a number between 1 and 10.

What actually happened

In September 2024, Zillow started showing climate risk scores on for-sale listings across the country — flood, wildfire, wind, heat and air quality — using data from a modeling firm called First Street. Each home got a 1-to-10 rating, with interactive maps and insurance notes attached right to the listing page.

Agents hated it. Sellers hated it more. The California Regional Multiple Listing Service, the biggest MLS in the country, publicly challenged the accuracy of First Street's flood modeling, and in November 2025 Zillow pulled the scores from more than a million listings.

Here's the part most homeowners missed: the score didn't go away. It just moved.

Zillow still links out to First Street from every listing page — buried far enough down that most people scroll past it — and still displays the FEMA flood zone designation. Meanwhile Redfin, Realtor.com and Homes.com never removed the First Street data at all. It's still sitting there on your listing, in color, on three of the four biggest portals in America.

So if you were relieved when the scores disappeared from Zillow, I have bad news. Your buyer can still find yours in about eleven seconds.

Why this hits differently in Chicago

Here's what makes this a genuinely local story instead of a national one.

FEMA flood maps are close to useless for the way Chicagoland actually floods.

FEMA maps are built around rivers and coastlines overflowing their banks. That is not our problem. Our problem is that a huge share of this region sits on old combined sewers — one pipe carrying both sewage and stormwater — and when four inches of rain lands in ninety minutes, that pipe has nowhere to put it. So it puts it in your basement, through the floor drain, in a form nobody wants to describe at a dinner party.

The numbers back this up in a way that should make every homeowner in Cook County sit up:

• The Illinois Department of Natural Resources found that 90% of flood damage claims between 2007 and 2014 were on properties outside the mapped 100-year floodplain. Not a few. Ninety percent.

• The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago looked at the two datasets side by side and concluded that First Street's methodology tracks actual Chicago flood losses better than FEMA's maps do. The Fed also noted that the overwhelming majority of Chicago flood damage claims are basement flooding from sewer backup.

• The Center for Neighborhood Technology found that 96% of ZIP codes in Cook County had flood damage claims. Not 96% of at-risk ZIP codes. Ninety-six percent of all of them.

• In one CNT study of Park Ridge's 60068 ZIP code, roughly 1 in 6 residential properties filed a flood damage claim over a five-year stretch, averaging about $5,584 apiece.

Read that Park Ridge number again. Park Ridge is not a swamp. It's a lovely suburb with good schools and a Metra station. That's the point — this isn't about waterfront property. It's about topography, sewer age, and the fact that Chicago rain events aren't behaving the way they did in 1985.

Which means when a buyer pulls up a flood score on a house in Berwyn or Norwood Park or Villa Park and sees a 6 out of 10, that number may be picking up something real that the FEMA map on the same page says is nothing.

Does it actually cost you money?

Yes, though less than the panic suggests.

Redfin ran its own large-scale experiment showing flood risk estimates to millions of users. Buyers shifted toward lower-risk properties, and homes flagged as high risk sold for about 1% less than comparable homes without visible risk data.

On Chicago's median sale price of roughly $420,000, that's about $4,200. Annoying, not catastrophic.

The bigger cost is the one that never shows up in a statistic: the buyer who quietly never books the showing. There's a widely reported case out of Richmond, Virginia where out-of-state buyers saw a 7-out-of-10 flood rating and canceled their plans to visit the house entirely. The listing agent believed the score was flat wrong, and couldn't get it removed. You can't measure the offer you never got.

Now the honest part

The models are genuinely contested, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

CRMLS didn't complain out of nowhere — they flagged entire neighborhoods being assigned enormous near-term flood probabilities in areas with no flood activity in forty or fifty years. A couple in Chappaqua, New York sued Zillow for $500,000, arguing their home was rated 9 out of 10 for flood risk despite not being in a FEMA flood zone at all, and that local drainage improvements weren't accounted for.

First Street stands behind its work, points to peer-reviewed methodology published openly, and notes that banks, insurers and federal agencies use the same models.

Both things can be true: the model can be directionally right about Chicago's sewer-driven flooding and still be wrong about your specific parcel. A predictive score is not an inspection. It is not a claims history. It is a computer's opinion about your dirt.

The problem is that your buyer doesn't know that, and doesn't have time to learn it while they're comparing your house to four others on a Saturday.

What to actually do about it if you're selling

1. Look yourself up before your buyer does. Pull your address on First Street's site, then look at your own address on Redfin, Realtor.com and Homes.com. Find out what number you're carrying. Being surprised by this during attorney review is the expensive version.

2. Know your removal options — and their limits. Redfin and Realtor.com have allowed sellers to request removal of the data; Zillow notably did not offer sellers an opt-out, which is part of how this whole fight started. Worth asking. Just understand that scrubbing a score is not the same as answering the question, because the buyer's inspector is going to walk into that basement anyway.

3. Do not, under any circumstances, get clever with the disclosure. The Illinois Residential Real Property Disclosure Report asks it directly: are you aware of flooding or recurring leakage problems in the crawl space or basement, and is the property in a floodplain. Illinois REALTORS' own legal guidance is that even a one-time seepage event during a bad storm season should generally be disclosed, and that if something happens between the time you hand over the form and the closing, you have to supplement it in writing.

A flood score is a marketing problem. An undisclosed flooding history is a lawsuit. Those are not in the same weight class.

4. Beat the number with paperwork. This is the actual play, and almost nobody does it. If you've done the work — overhead sewer conversion, backflow prevention valve, sump pump with battery backup, regraded yard, extended downspouts, new drain tile — put the receipts in a folder and hand it to every buyer with the disclosure. A documented fix beats a denial every single time. "Scored a 6, here's the $9,000 overhead sewer conversion from 2022 and the permit" is a completely different conversation than "I don't know why it says that."

5. Talk about insurance before the buyer's lender does. Standard homeowners policies generally don't cover flood, and sewer backup is typically an endorsement you have to add on purpose. If your home has coverage in place, that's a selling point. If you're a buyer, price it during attorney review, not after.

If you're buying

Use the score the way it's actually useful: as a question generator, not a verdict.

Walk the basement and look up. Water lines on the joists, a fresh coat of paint only on the lower two feet of block wall, brand-new flooring in an otherwise untouched basement, a floor drain with a rubber plug jammed in it — those tell you more than any 1-to-10 rating ever will. Ask the seller for the disclosure early. Ask the neighbors, who will tell you everything, immediately, with enthusiasm. And ask whether the block has overhead sewers, because on a lot of Chicago blocks the answer explains the whole street.

A 7 out of 10 on a house with a converted overhead sewer and a battery-backup sump is a better buy than a 3 out of 10 with a floor drain and a prayer.

Thinking about selling? Let's talk about what your home is actually worth.

I've been a licensed Illinois broker for 25 years with over $100 million in closed sales, and I've walked more Chicagoland basements than I care to count. I know which blocks flood, which ones just have a bad reputation, and how to market a home so that a computer-generated number isn't the first thing a buyer decides about it.

Here's how The Rosenberg Group works:

• 1.25% listing commission — roughly half the typical Chicagoland listing rate

• Zero Commission Clause — find your own buyer, owe me nothing

• Cancel anytime — no hostage agreements

• Professional photography and a 3D Matterport tour on every listing, at no additional cost

Same marketing, same negotiation, same 25 years of experience. You just keep more of your equity.

Call or text me at 312.882.9797 for a free, no-pressure home valuation — including an honest read on how your property is being scored online and what to do about it before you list.

Jason Rosenberg The Rosenberg Group at Infiniti Properties 312.882.9797 www.jasonrosenbergrealestate.com

Sources

1. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, "More Chicago Properties at Risk for Flooding Than Flood Maps Suggest" — https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/blogs/chicago-fed-insights/2020/chicago-flood-risk

2. RISMedia, "Zillow Quietly Removes Climate Risk Scores From Listings" — https://ace.rismedia.com/2025/12/02/zillow-removes-climate-risk-scores/

3. CNN, coverage of industry pressure on climate risk data — https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/02/climate/zillow-climate-data-extreme-weather-first-street-redfin

4. TechCrunch, "Zillow drops climate risk scores after agents complained of lost sales" — https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/01/zillow-drops-climate-risk-scores-after-agents-complained-of-lost-sales

5. Inside Climate News, on efforts to restore the deleted scores — https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20012026/climate-expert-works-to-restore-zillow-climate-risk-scores/

6. ProgramBusiness, on seller opt-out policies across portals — https://programbusiness.com/news/zillow-pulls-climate-risk-ratings-from-over-one-million-listings/

7. MassLandlords, on what Zillow listings display now — https://masslandlords.net/zillow-removes-vital-climate-risk-info-on-real-estate-listings/

8. Redfin, Flood Factor methodology and score ranges — https://redfin.com/guides/climate-change-housing-impact/methodology

9. FEMA, "Urban Flooding: Guidance for Homeowners and Renters" (Cook County combined sewer systems) — https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_urban_flooding_guidance_for_homeowners_and_renters.pdf

10. Center for Neighborhood Technology study on Park Ridge 60068 flood claims, via Patch — https://patch.com/illinois/parkridge/study-park-ridge-area-flood-claims-topped-11-million-e8ca48e838

11. Illinois REALTORS®, Residential Real Property Disclosure Report (Form 108) — https://www.illinoisrealtors.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/108.pdf

12. Illinois REALTORS®, "Hot on the Hotline: Disclosing Seepage or Leaks" — https://www.illinoisrealtors.org/blog/hot-on-the-hotline/