Evaluating Flood Risk
Chris Murphy here coming to you from my home base, the COMPASS office in Point Ruston, which is a waterfront master planned community along the shoreline of the South Puget Sound here in Tacoma, Washington.
Today I'm going to give you a quick demonstration of how I illustrate flood risk to clients. I do this both in the office and through screenshots that I send in emails to them.
Before I do, I'm thrilled to share that we're now over 100 waterfront properties listed by Compass Agents on waterfronthomes.com. As I've shared in the past, my goal is to feature every waterfront property listed by a Compass Agent, and so while we still have a long way to go, I'm really grateful for all the collaboration of bringing everybody's waterfront listings together, you all submitting them, and allowing me to feature them to capture traffic and leads away from the portals and get the clients back in the hands of the listing agent.
Thank you all very much and I look forward to continuing to promote more waterfront listings. things.
Speaking of portals, seemingly without fail, clients will go to Zillow and Redfin and other websites like that and see an extreme flood rating with a 10 out of 10 risk of flooding. Sometimes that's very concerning to people, but I think there's always an opportunity to illustrate that there's more to the story than just some automation can determine.
The irony of this is that on this listing right here, this is my listing, it says FEMA determines a minimal risk of flooding in this area. However, it says there's a 10 out of 10 chance, and in the next five years, there's a 98% chance of flooding. So, one of the things I think is important to point out to people initially is that this is a projected chance of one inch of flooding. So, what does that mean? Uh, we're going to look into that in a second, but also this is a very inaccurate illustration because down here it says that in this dark area, there's a depth of flooding could be three feet, which makes no sense, especially as you can see in this satellite, there's a big rock bulkhead here.
This is a hundred and seventy-five feet of waterfront and this this photo was taken at almost high tide. The high tide line is right here about thirteen feet above sea level, and here in Washington State, our tides, can go anywhere from approximately eighteen feet of tidal movement. So, a really high tide would be like a plus fourteen in some areas and then really low tide would be a minus four. So, when the tide's completely out here, there's a big, beautiful beach and this bulkhead is sixteen feet tall. So that's an important distinction that Zillow and other portals have no idea of the characteristics of the property.
So what I do for my clients when I illustrate this is I pull up a couple of websites and one of which is the FEMA flood map. This is the property. You can see the bulkheads right out here. And what this says, according to FEMA, is that it's in a zone AE, which is the hundred-year floodplain. So this line is the hundred-year floodplain, meaning it has a one percent chance of flooding in a given year. And this says that the base flood elevation is 14. So first, as I mentioned, I know this property, I know this bulkhead is 16 feet tall. So as I mentioned, the, this is probably a 13 foot, base elevation. So one more foot above that, it's still going to be well under the top of the bulkhead.
The next thing that I show people, I pull up a county GIS map. And what I do is I turn on the satellite imagery in the contours, the topography lines. and so what this illustrates you can see the bulkhead right here this darker line right here you can see is the 20-foot elevation line and so then each one of these lines is two feet so this line right here is the 18-foot line so that's the house the house is 18 feet above sea level so even though the base flood elevation is 14 once the water reaches a 14 FEMA is going to consider that a flood stage but it still has four feet of vertical elevation to go before it actually would cause flood damage to a home.
Going back to Zillow's extreme flood factor here, if it is pulling from FEMA, so if it's one inch over 14 feet, then it's going to consider it a flood stage, which, yes, that makes sense. 10 out of 10, for flood risk, yes, it's going to be one inch over 14 feet of base flood elevation. However, it's going to be nowhere near the top of the bulkhead and nowhere near the house. I do this exact demonstration to clients and I think it's always important to say that this is not something that can be stated with 100% certainty and mother nature is always unpredictable but if you lay out the facts like this I think you can give clients an opportunity to make an informed decision about their comfort level with with a given flood risk.
That's the process that I go through. I hope it's, this is helpful to you and you can use these resources to demonstrate to your clients what a potential flood risk may be for a property that they're considering. And, in the end, illustrate to them that you understand the waterfront market and the things that should be considered when purchasing and investigating a waterfront property.
Thank you again for submitting your waterfront listings and I look forward to continuing to help promote your waterfront properties. Have a great day.
Posted by Chris Murphy on
Leave A Comment