Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Four hurricanes are currently brewing in the Pacific and Atlantic. Wildfires have ravaged more than 8 million acres in the U.S. in 2015 alone. And in just the first two weeks of May this year, nearly 150 tornadoes touched down in the U.S.
Many American homeowners might still be surprised at the risk their home faces of getting hit by a natural disaster in the near future. A report released on Thursday by real estate research firm RealtyTrac found that 43% of U.S. homes and condos — that’s a total of 35.8 million homes — are at a high risk or very high risk of at least one type of natural disaster. The report examined 2,318 counties nationwide and assigned each a score of natural disaster risk score from 0 to 300 based on their risk of wildfire, hurricane, flood, tornado and earthquake; the higher the score the higher the risk of natural disaster.
The impacts of this trend are devastating people’s lives — and their homes: “Since 2008, an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards,” a report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, an independent, non-governmental humanitarian organization studying displacement, reveals. “This is the equivalent to one person being displaced every second.”
Here's RealtyTrac's Vice President Daren Blomqvist with more information on how natural disasters can impact on the real estate market:
