Climate change

Nikitra Bailey, EVP at the National Fair Housing Alliance, says communities of color are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change because of prior redlining practices. She explains that a HUD rule could make a big difference.

Western utilities and beyond are finding it prohibitively expensive, if not impossible, to insure against potential fire-related claims. The issue will become more pressing as climate change makes droughts more intense and frequent, heightening the chances of more destructive infernos.

Understanding the peril is important for both primary and secondary mortgage market pricing of loans and risk, experts in a panel to the Mortgage Bankers Association's Secondary Conference said Tuesday.

"Lax regulation and monitoring of property insurers makes Florida mortgage markets far more exposed to climate risk than people might think," said Parinitha Sastry, an author of a working paper by researchers at Harvard University, Columbia University and the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Housing Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Federal Housing Finance Agency have started gathering data and analyzing how climate risk will impact the housing ecosystem.

An insurance-indexed debt-to-income ratio could help mitigate borrowers' rising premiums, and help maintain a healthy servicing portfolio, experts said.

The increasing frequency and severity of droughts was top of mind for panelists at AmeriCatalyst's "Going to Extremes" conference Thursday.

Natural disasters have hammered U.S. home insurers and hindered some stateside origination activity, but no American lender has publicly pronounced a pullback over climate risks.

The Securities and Exchange Commission finalized a pared-down version of rules governing climate-risk disclosure by public companies first proposed in March 2022. Experts say even the weakened rule will likely face challenges in Congress and the courtroom.

The volume of active for-sale condo listings in the Sunshine State increased by 40% last month compared to a year earlier, Redfin said.

The frozen rain pellets which can destroy roofs, sidings and windows were responsible for the largest percentage of insured loss last year.

The announcement came after several major insurer said they would stop issuing new homeowner policies or renewing existing ones because California's current rules made it too costly to cover homes.

Reeling from four hurricanes in 2020 and 2021 that caused $23 billion in damage, the state is undergoing an insurance calamity that is harming its economy and even reducing its population.

While congressional leaders fight over what to include with the $12 billion slated for FEMA, others feel that the reliance on FEMA and the federal government for disaster relief may begin to change.

Four out of five prospective house shoppers take into consideration how climate risks such as floods, wildfires and extreme temperatures can impact a property, per a Zillow report.

The storm is slamming housing markets already beset by some of the nation's highest property insurance premiums.

As the world reels from the mounting impact of heat waves, droughts and fiercer storms, there is growing concern that credit rating analysts are misreading climate risks in the $133 trillion global bond market, to the detriment of creditors and borrowers alike.

The nation's most flood-prone counties experienced a net influx of about 400,000 people in 2021 and 2022, Redfin found.

The government-sponsored enterprise's chief executive managing the issue is looking at how things like roof pitch can mitigate the impact of natural disasters on homes.

The government-sponsored enterprise has been using a predictive Jupiter Intelligence score suite to review its more than 17 million residential mortgage-related assets.