A “cheap” home in a flood zone isn't cheap. We check before you fall in love - using free official FEMA data.
Most home sites show you the price, the photos, the comps - and stay silent about whether the home sits in a wildfire or flood zone where insurance is costly, or sometimes hard to get at all. That silence can wreck the real monthly cost. We check it for you.
For each home's exact location, we ask FEMA's flood maps whether it falls in a designated flood zone (the kind where flood insurance is usually required), and we ask FEMA's National Risk Index for its wildfire and earthquake risk rating.
Sometimes the precise point-level reading comes back empty (rural gaps, an odd coordinate, or the service is briefly down). So we built a safety net: a one-time download of FEMA's official county-level risk table that fills any blank - so the warning is never silently empty. We always prefer the more precise reading and only fall back to the county rating when we have to.
This risk reading does two jobs: it shows you a plain warning (“In a FEMA flood zone - flood insurance is likely required”), and it quietly nudges the home-insurance estimate higher in the true-monthly-cost panel, so the extra cost shows up in real dollars.
It's the same public FEMA data your lender and insurer use - not our opinion. And it's strictly a natural-hazard signal. We never use it to judge a neighbourhood or the people in it.