In the real estate sector, there are dozens of different tools that real estate professionals use every day to help grow their businesses. These tools vary from those associated with marketing and advertising, climate relationship management, and ways to make MLS listings as effective as possible, such as the inclusion of virtual 3D imaging data for properties. This is to be expected, as the real estate industry itself is driven by smart professionals leveraging every tool they have to their advantage.

Yet today, there may be one more tool for real estate agents, brokers, and investors to turn to in their efforts to facilitate growth. This new tool, known as climate risk analysis, is fast proving to be instrumental in the 21st century as we begin to feel the unmistakable impacts of climate change across the globe in the form of more energetic and potentially destructive weather patterns. Here’s how climate risk analysis can help real estate professionals work better.

What Is Climate Risk Analysis?

Changing climates around the world have the potential to impact the people living in different locations in specific ways. In the case of the American Southeast, for example, a warmer climate means that the hurricane season is longer, and that individual hurricanes are more powerful. This, in turn, means that property damage due to high winds and flooding in these locations are more likely to occur. Likewise, in places such as the West, where climate change has led to longer and more powerful droughts, forest fires have become more widespread and dangerous to those living nearby as well.

Climate risk analysis takes these climactic changes into account. Relying on historical climate and weather data gathered over time, advanced, AI-driven computer systems can then analyze this data to identify trends and use predictive modeling to indicate the climate conditions likely to occur in specific geographic locations in the near future. The upshot of all this is that people living in these regions can then consult the results of this analysis to gain a better understanding of the risks that climate change poses to their safety and comfort.

How Real Estate Professionals Can Leverage Climate Risk Analysis

The need for paying more attention to the ways climate change will affect how we work and live is clear. As the effects of climate change grow more pronounced, it’s likely we’ll see more people moving away from locations where it has become too expensive or dangerous to live and gravitate towards areas where the impacts from climate change are less likely to be negative, such as regions at higher elevations away from shorelines and flood plains for example. 

This creates massive opportunities for real estate professionals that delve into the world of climate risk analysis. By accessing this information, a real estate agent can provide detailed explanations to prospective buyers and sellers about the relative safety and comfort associated with specific properties. Investors, meanwhile, can choose their investment opportunities with more care when they can see which properties are likely to be impacted the most by climate change as well, therefore maximizing the potential return on their investment. 

Better To Use These Tools Than Ignore Them

At this point in time, it’s been made very clear that there’s no avoiding the fact that climate change is having a strong impact on our world. The effects of climate change are being felt both globally and locally, and real estate professionals that work and live in locations that will be affected by climate change need to acknowledge that fact and act accordingly. Even as more attention is paid to global efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions, the biggest driver of climate change, we’re already experiencing the consequences. This means that, if you want to remain an effective real estate professional, you must take the effects of climate change into account.
In such situations, using tools like climate risk analysis therefore becomes an absolute necessity in serving clients more effectively. With government agencies and insurance underwriters already making use of these technologies to predict the impact of natural disasters and underwrite risk for flood insurance, these tools are now becoming both more advanced and widespread enough for those within the real estate industry to use going forward. Using climate risk analysis will soon become a part of the process for real estate agents, so the time is now to become familiar with how these processes work and to learn how to apply this data to local markets.