Environmental and local government advocates – largely rooted in Hampton Roads – have pushed Virginia’s General Assembly for more than a decade to expand the state’s real estate disclosure law to protect homebuyers from the growing risks of flooding.
Last week, the latest attempt failed. A legislative subcommittee on housing and consumer protection tabled a bill that proposed sellers disclose whether a property is located in a high-risk federal flood zone after the association representing Virginia real estate agents withheld support.
The Norfolk-based nonprofit Wetlands Watch helps lead the charge advocating for better flood disclosure policy. Executive director Mary-Carson Stiff said climate change is increasing the risk of flooding in all corners of the state, from rising sea levels and more intense rainstorms.
Stiff said this year’s defeat is especially disappointing because the bill, sponsored by Del. Phil Hernandez (D-Norfolk), was already “watered down” to gain more widespread, bipartisan support.
“It’s a sad reality of where we are,” she said. “It’s so serious that our potential buyers are not fully informed about their risk.”
The Virginia Realtors organization, however, says buyers alone can determine what risk they’re willing to accept, and already have access to public information about flood zones.
“There is no new or different website that a seller would go to versus a buyer,” said the association’s chief external affairs officer Martin Johnson. “So we just didn't feel like that warranted enough new information to pass a statute.”
Virginia is known as a “buyer beware” state, meaning prospective buyers are tasked with doing their own due diligence on many aspects of a property – including flood risk.
There are a handful of mandatory disclosures, such as whether the home has been used to manufacture illegal drugs or is located near a noisy military air base.
In 2021, for the first time, a narrow piece of flood disclosure moved from the buyer beware waivers list to the mandatory column.
The General Assembly approved a change requiring sellers to say if their property is categorized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a repetitive loss, meaning it received multiple federal flood insurance payouts within a 10-year period.
But flood disclosure advocates say that doesn’t go nearly far enough.
“For me, it's just about disclosing information that I think all of us, and certainly everyday working class people, would want to know before they make the single biggest purchase of their life,” Del. Hernandez told lawmakers last week.
Wetlands Watch policy program director Ian Blair said buyers need to know more to plan their finances accordingly. Federally-backed mortgages in the riskiest FEMA flood zones require flood insurance.
“I would hate to have a $13,000 flood insurance annual premium at the very end of (the process) that I didn't factor in,” Blair said. It could mean: “This is my dream house, and I'm at the very top of the scale, and have that all fall apart. That is something that we’ve heard.”
Johnson, with the Realtors group, said only a mortgage lender can tell a buyer for sure whether flood insurance will be required.
“You can make some informed assumptions, but that's really all that they are,” he said.
Agents are already managing a delicate balance, he added.
“It’s a tricky situation, because I think the buyer's agent is put in a tough position. They don't want to stigmatize a property, which can have very damning impacts. But they also want to make sure that the buyer goes into the process as much as they can with their eyes wide open.”
Hernandez carried a bill at last year’s General Assembly session that was much more comprehensive, including applying the rules to landlords renting properties and requiring disclosures on past flood damage and any flood mitigation work done on the property.
Throughout the past year, he worked with the Realtors association and state Housing Commission to draft new language, which ended up limited to just a seller’s actual knowledge of their location within a FEMA flood hazard area.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, which pushes for flood disclosure nationwide, said the bill was changed so much that the nonprofit could no longer support it.
“Flooding can quickly turn a dream home into a nightmare,” Joel Scata, senior attorney for environmental health at the NRDC, said in a statement this week. “Home buyers should have the right to know if the house they are about to purchase has previously flooded.”
The NRDC rates Virginia’s current regulations with an “F” grade. The Carolinas each have an “A” after recent changes in their state laws.
Emily Steinhilber, director of climate resilient coasts and watersheds for the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund in Virginia, said she hopes it doesn’t take devastating flood damage to make changes.
“The scale of our disasters has been comparatively smaller than our neighboring states,” she said. “And so preventative flood risk reduction, like preventative health care, always takes a lot of groundwork.”
Advocates encourage people to research their risk through the Virginia Flood Risk Information System.
Editor’s note: Steinhilber is a member of WHRO’s Governing Board of Directors. WHRO’s newsroom is editorially independent.
