What your Zillow flood score isn’t telling you

Redfin, Zillow, and Realtor.com draw their flood risk from the same algorithmic score, licensed from a single vendor. The big portals are useful for browsing; they just aren’t the full record.

That matters in this market. Homeowners near Asheville have publicly disputed scores that don’t match what their neighbors see, even when their properties are side by side. A score is an estimate. It isn’t a determination.

The federal record is the FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer (NFHL): zone letters like AE, AO, and X that say whether a property sits in a Special Flood Hazard Area, and what that means for mortgage-backed flood insurance. FEMA also keeps the formal mechanism property owners use to correct a designation that’s wrong — Letters of Map Amendment (LOMA) and Letters of Map Revision (LOMR).

North Carolina’s own Floodplain Mapping Program (NC FRIS) often carries more current or more granular data than the federal layer alone, and Buncombe County publishes the effective flood layers through its GIS.

When the layers disagree, the official determination is what insurance decisions follow — not the score.

Look up any Buncombe County address and the flood panel returns the official zone from the current effective flood layers, checks for a LOMA/LOMR on file, and cross-references NC FRIS — with the source and last-updated date on the panel.

If a portal score conflicts with the official zone, we don’t argue with the score. We surface the sourced local context and link you to the official maps so you can draw your own conclusion.