Florida and Nebraska have both sued the company behind the flood, fire and heat scores that appear on home listings. Your clients are reading those scores, forming opinions about coverage from them, and bringing those opinions to you. Here is how to handle the conversation.
Somewhere in your book right now is a client who looked at a house online, saw a flood score of 7 out of 10 next to the photos, and decided something about insurance before ever calling you. Maybe they decided the house is uninsurable. Maybe they decided a low score means they can skip flood coverage. Either way, the number came from a model your client has never heard of, and that model is now the subject of lawsuits by two state attorneys general.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit against First Street Technology on October 23, 2026 in the circuit court for Polk County, under the state's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. HousingWire and ESG Dive both reported on the complaint. Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers filed a similar case in Dakota County District Court on August 27, 2026. First Street makes the Risk Factor scores, numbered 1 to 10 for flood, wildfire, wind, heat and air quality, that real estate portals have displayed on listings for the past several years. MSCI acquired the company in August and declined to comment to reporters on the Florida filing.
What the States Are Alleging
The core of both complaints is the gap between First Street's scores and federal flood maps. According to HousingWire's summary of the Florida filing, the complaint cites a home in Oldsmar that FEMA places in Zone X, the minimal flood hazard designation, while First Street gave it a Flood Factor of 7 and labeled it Major. Florida also alleges there is no practical way for an owner to dispute a score, pointing to First Street's stated policy of generally not changing scores in response to individual complaints. The state is asking the court to bar the company from describing its scores as peer reviewed, transparent or accurate, and is seeking civil penalties of $10,000 per violation and $15,000 per violation involving a senior.
Nebraska's complaint, as described in the attorney general's announcement, says First Street's flood model identifies more than twice as many properties at 100-year flood risk as government data does, with much of the difference clustered around small waterways and tributaries. It also alleges the model does not account for flood protection measures owners have paid for.
There is a fair counterpoint, and HousingWire noted it. FEMA maps and a forward-looking private model are measuring different things on different time horizons, so a mismatch between them does not by itself prove either one wrong. First Street has said its methods rest on peer-reviewed research. Nothing has been decided in either case, and First Street had not filed a response in Polk County as of this week.
Where Your Clients Are Seeing This
Zillow stopped displaying the scores directly in December 2025 after agents and the California Regional MLS objected, and now links out to First Street instead. CNN and HousingWire reported at the time that Redfin and Realtor.com kept the scores on their listings, and coverage of the Florida suit confirms both still show them. So depending on which app your client used last night, they saw a number, a link, or nothing.
That inconsistency is the first thing worth explaining. The score is not part of the listing. It is not part of the appraisal. It is not something the seller, the listing agent or the lender produced. It is a third-party estimate that one portal shows and another has removed, and the people who built it are now defending it in court.
What Actually Decides Flood Coverage
The question behind the score is usually one of two things: will I be required to buy flood insurance, and will it cost a fortune. Neither answer comes from First Street.
The purchase requirement comes from the lender, and the lender looks at FEMA's flood zone for the property. A home in a Special Flood Hazard Area with a federally backed mortgage must carry flood coverage. A home in Zone X does not have to, regardless of what number appears on a listing. A client who saw a 7 and assumed they would be forced to buy flood insurance may be wrong, and a client who saw a 2 and assumed they are safe is reading a model, not a map.
The price comes from the carrier. The National Flood Insurance Program rates each property individually on its own data, and private flood carriers run their own models. Some of those models may share inputs with First Street, and some do not. The only way to know what the coverage costs is to quote it, which takes you a few minutes and settles the question better than any argument about methodology.
What the score is good for is prompting the conversation. If a client in Zone X saw a high score and got nervous, that is a client who is open to hearing why flood coverage outside the required zone is worth a look. You do not have to defend the score or attack it to use the opening it created.
The Seller Side of the Conversation
Both lawsuits were brought on behalf of sellers, not buyers. The complaints describe homes that sat longer and drew lower offers because of a score the owner could not change. If you insure a client who is listing a home, they may already be dealing with this, and the Florida complaint notes that some sellers have taken to posting FEMA maps on their own listings to counter it.
You can help here without wading into the dispute. A seller can show a buyer the FEMA zone determination, the elevation certificate if one exists, the home's claims history through a loss report, and an actual flood quote. Those four documents answer every question a buyer's agent is going to ask, and all of them carry more weight in a negotiation than a number on a website that the state of Florida is suing over.
Keep the tone measured. The scores may turn out to be flawed, or they may turn out to be a reasonable early warning that the federal maps are slow to reflect. Your value to the client is not an opinion on that question. It is knowing which documents decide the coverage, pulling them quickly, and explaining the difference between a model and a map in language a nervous buyer can repeat to their spouse that night.