Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth.
In this video I'm going to talk to you about an issue that
I think a lot of real estate investors of all kinds tend to overlook.
And that issue has to do with whether your property is
located in or anywhere near a flood zone.
And this is something that I think a lot of people
don't pay any attention to because for the most part,
flooding is something that doesn't happen often, or at least doesn't affect us personally.
We might hear about it or see it on the news, but most people
can't say that they have personally been affected by a flood.
So it kind of just falls by the wayside. We don't pay a lot of attention to it, but it still matters.
And it's still important for you to be aware of the situation,
because whether there are improvements on that property
or say, if you're looking at a piece of vacant land and you think that someday there might
be something built on that property, pretty much any lender out there who lends money
and takes this property as collateral is going to care about whether that property's in a flood zone.
And if it isn't a flood zone, it's probably safe to assume that they're going to force you
to have flood insurance on that property.
Because if at any point during the life of the loan, a flood hits that property and destroys it.
You better believe that matters to them and they want to be prepared for that.
And the problem with flood insurance is that depending on where your property's located,
what kind of flood zone it's in, if at all,
it could potentially be very, very expensive
to maintain flood insurance on that property on an annual basis.
And even if you're somebody like me who typically buys properties free and clear,
and there's nobody forcing you to get flood insurance, even then, it's still important to know
about this because in the future, if you end up selling this property to somebody else
and they need a mortgage or some kind of loan,
and then their lender forces them to get flood insurance
that is potentially something that would make them walk away from the deal as well.
So you can't just ignore this.
This is something you really want to be aware of one way or another
what the situation is in terms of whether or not it's located in or anywhere near a flood zone.
So how exactly do you go about verifying this?
Well, I'm going to show you an example from my own life when I was just getting out of college,
my wife and I bought our first house right here in this neighborhood that we're looking at.
The interesting thing about this neighborhood was that
there was a little Creek that ran through it,
which you can kind of see if you follow the mouse, it sort of goes over here and up around there.
And you can just sort of see where that water goes.
And every single year around in the time
that winter was ending and spring was just around the corner.
All the snow would melt and the water level of this Creek would go
way, way, way high, like flooding the nearby sidewalks.
And sometimes even getting in the road. Just on the average year
you could always expect the water level to rise significantly.
And I remember thinking back then, man, I wonder if this river has ever just had a massive flood
and gotten water all over this neighborhood. Like I wonder if that's happened
and if so, which of these houses were affected by that.
And it's actually pretty easy to figure out what the situation is here.
And I'm going to show you a couple resources online,
both of which are free that can help you figure out
if there's a floodzone that affects your property.
So the first one here is on the FEMA website and this is run and maintained by the US government.
So for the most part, they have flood maps that cover
most of the places that are going to affect you
if you're buying property in the United States.
So all you got to do is go here. I'm going to include a link to this page beneath this video.
If you want to come check it out and whatever the longitude and latitude coordinates are,
or the address of the property is just go ahead and enter it in here.
And I actually know of a specific house that happens to be right by this river.
It's the house that's right here. If you can see that.
So I'm going to punch that address in here and we'll go check it out.
And what it's going to do is it's going to show us this map right here.
And if it has a digital map, it's going to show you right there.
In this case, there is no such information, but what you can do is click here
and go check out the most recent up to date PDF that they have on file.
And you can check out how that looks and what this does here is it shows you this map
and we can zoom in on where we're looking. So, we're going to zoom in right here.
You kind of have to eyeball it to figure out where your property is
in relation to the body of water that you're looking at.
So if we go back to this map here on Google Earth,
you can sort of see where the river runs, how it curves around here like that.
And then if we go back here to this PDF and keep zooming in,
we can see that same curve going right over here.
So this spot right here on the map right at that corner is the same thing
as this spot right here on Google Earth.
And as you can see, according to this map anyway
that property is pretty squarely inside of A4 flood zone.
So what does that mean? Is that a serious problem?
Well, there's another thing I'm going to show you.
And again, I'll link to this below. If we go here to this PDF from the USDA
there's actually several different places on the internet
that say pretty much the same thing as this,
but it says right here that there was apparently an old format.
They used to designate flood zones by A1 through A30.
So given that this is A4, it kind of falls within that category.
Basically, what this is saying is that currently this would be called an AE flood zone.
AE floodzone is essentially an area that has a 1% annual chance of flooding,
or in other words, it's in the 100-year flood plant.
So every 100 years, approximately you can expect some kind of flood to affect this area.
That's obviously just a really good thing to be aware of.
And there's actually a couple other websites I want to show you that might also be useful.
So if you don't want to deal with trying to find those old maps from FEMA,
FEMA also has this national flood hazard layer viewer
which is essentially just a map of the entire US.
And what you can do is type in the address or the city
or the coordinates or wherever of the place you're trying to find.
And it will take you right there. And if it has that flood map here on the database,
it will show you what flood zone it's in.
So for example, I'm going to go here to Muskegon, Michigan,
where I know there are some flood zones.
We'll zoom in here and you can see what it looks like.
And once we zoom in a little bit closer
by the way, each one of these little rectangles you see here represents one of the flood maps
but this just puts it right over the satellite maps
so you can see exactly where those flood maps are
and it will show you which flood zone it is.
So, for example, when we zoom in here,
we can see this. it looks like we just lost the satellite. Oh, there we go.
So we can zoom in here
and you can see this sort of turquoise colored area that goes over the land.
And that basically just points out, "Hey, this is where a flood zone is",
and it shows you which flood zone it is.
This one is zone AE. And if we move around the map will update.
It's a little bit slow, but it will show you where those flood zones are.
It also shows you the date of that map.
If you recall this flood map we were looking at just a couple minutes ago,
one of the problems with these flood maps is that although they're available,
they're also really old in a lot of cases.
This particular one was made back in November 5th, 1982.
And since then, they've actually built some berms around this river to reduce the severity
and the spread of the flood zone around this river.
So this is actually like old information and it doesn't even necessarily apply anymore.
And that's one of the problems with using these old FEMA flood maps.
And I think FEMA is aware of this and that's part of why they're very, very slowly
bringing all those flood maps onto this flood map viewer.
And one of the problems I think you'll evitably run into with this kind of flood map viewer,
is that say, if we go back to that original location I was showing you
you'll see that it does include the correct date of back in 1982 when it was last created,
but it doesn't really show you anything over here
because this particular area has not been updated on the map yet.
So sometimes it'll come across like these blackout areas where there just is no information
and that's kind of frustrating.
And in those cases you would have to refer back to these original maps.
But I think probably as a first step, this type of mapping tool is probably a little bit more useful.
And I still wouldn't call it incredibly user friendly
but still it's probably better than using those maps.
There's also this other website I wanted to show you about.
This is called OB risk.
And this particular map works very similarly to FEMA's flood map viewer.
It's just even more user friendly and just more visually appealing
and easier to understand than FEMA's version.
For example, if we go here to Muskegon again, and go check that out.
Now we can see a little bit more clearly where those flood lines are, and we can see that
the red areas are high risk and the yellow areas are moderate risk and the dark areas are low risk.
And if you wanted to, you could search by coordinates up here,
or you could search by the address,
whatever you have, it will take you there and show you what information is available from FEMA.
This basically pulls directly from the FEMA map.
So it's going to be all the same information
it's just going to be a little bit simpler and easier to understand.
And another cool thing about this map is that if you are looking in an area that is susceptible
to wildfires or earthquakes or severe wind or anything like that,
it can show you the risk level for those issues as well.
You can also click on this fire station button,
and it will show you these little bubbles all over the place,
which is basically indicating where all the local fire stations are
in relation to the property that you're looking at.
And lastly, if you ever do want to find out what the actual replacement costs would be in the area
where you're looking, this isn't going to tell you anything specific to your property,
but it does kind of give you an idea for if there were an issue with something,
this is about what the replacement cost would be.
And if you did want to get an insurance quote,
you can click on this and it will take you at this page.
You can put in your property address and get like a literal quote from an insurance company,
but it all starts here with this map.
And if you're just trying to look at your property to figure out,
Am I in a flood zone? If so, what is the risk?
And if you want to find out what the specific flood zone is,
if that matters to you, you could check here
and you might be able to find the answer.
But again, I just wanted to give you guys a number of different resources
you could use to try to get these questions answered
If you're trying to figure out what the situation is
with flood zones around the properties that you are looking at.
I hope that was helpful.
Thanks for watching. And I'll talk to you again soon.