cnn.com - Zillow climate data extreme weather first street redfin

Zillow, the nation’s largest real estate listing website, has removed extreme weather risk data meant to help buyers figure out if the biggest purchase of their life is particularly susceptible to floods, high winds or wildfires.

Now, other major real estate listing websites are facing pressure to do the same.

That pressure is coming from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which operates one of the largest private databases of home listings in the country — essential to Zillow’s business model.

There is a vast difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk allows a quantitative expected value of an investment. Uncertainty makes it a crap shoot. By removing the data it is the expectation of the real estate industry that the possibility of disaster will be obscured - and that may be true for the naive, but as demonstrated by stock market crashes, the feeling of uncertainty can evoke much greater price swings than the careful consideration of risk.

Jeff