This story is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

It took just three months for Samantha Fischetti to discover the hidden flood history of her new home. By 3 a.m. one rain-drenched night, the rising water reached three feet — inside the house.

She’d soon learn it wasn’t the first time. When contractors peeled back ruined drywall, rotten beams exposed damage from previous flooding.

It wouldn’t be the last time either. In the six years Fischetti has owned the home on a quiet Hollywood street not far from Interstate 95, three more floods have inundated every room.

Fischetti would never have bought the place if she knew about its soggy past. But she said she got no warning. Not from her real estate agent, not from the city or state or federal government, and certainly not from the sellers.

“This would have been really nice to know when we bought the house,” Fischetti said. “There was no disclosure on the seller’s disclosure. Nothing. No one disclosed anything.”

Fischetti had unwittingly waded into one of the murkiest secrets in the Florida real estate market: The rules and laws surrounding disclosure of previous flooding — a growing risk driven by rising seas, wetter storms and more powerful hurricanes – are muddy at best and the limited records that do exist are largely hidden from the public.

A Miami Herald investigation reveals that in a state with massive amounts of vulnerable residential real estate, it’s difficult for the public to identify flood-prone neighborhoods and streets — and nearly impossible for prospective buyers to find the history of individual homes.

Among other key findings on the staggeringly expensive questions surrounding flooding disclosure in Florida:

The one government organization that possesses a wealth of data — the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers federal flood insurance — keeps specific addresses of flooded properties under tight wraps. Even FEMA’s list of homes that flood repeatedly is kept secret from the public, including potential buyers.
Inadequate — in some cases nonexistent — tracking means that Florida’s growing flood risks are almost certainly underestimated.
Sellers and their real estate agents have effectively been operating on the honor system for decades, pointing to lawsuits as a powerful tool for enforcing allegations of undisclosed problems. But in a review of cases statewide, The Herald found lawsuits often prove difficult to win and not worth the considerable legal costs.
The Florida Legislature, after largely avoiding the issue for years, this month approved a law specifically requiring property owners to disclose past flooding — a significant step forward in a state that has long been a laggard, despite having the highest risk in the nation.

The impact of the culture of secrecy on individual homeowners can be catastrophic.

It’s been a personal and financial ordeal for Fischetti, whose fiancé unexpectedly died last year, leaving her to raise a toddler with cerebral palsy on her own. Repair bills have now exceeded the original purchase price of $340,000. She wants to sell, but with the new state law, she will have to do what so many others don’t — disclose a flooding history that will likely give many prospective buyers pause.

“I have showings, a lot. It’s just when they see the sandbags piled near the doors, they’re like ‘what happened here’,” she said. “And I’m not going to lie. I tell them it has flooded.”

But there’s an even bigger blind spot when it comes to suburban flooding. Haphazard tracking of problems, typically relying on residents to self-report if it’s done at all, also masks the scope of Florida’s rising flood risks and damages.

FEMA data shows the agency has paid out $16.8 billion in damages since 2000 on more than 220,000 claims — some doled out repeatedly to the same problematic properties.

Experts stress those figures are almost certainly significant undercounts. That’s because, even in the low-lying hurricane magnet of Florida, only a small percentage of homeowners have federal flood insurance. Roughly 80 percent of Florida’s residential structures, more than five million homes, don’t have it, according to a Herald analysis of FEMA data. And no federal, state or local agency, the Herald found, collects damage data from uninsured homes — let alone makes it public.

That often leaves would-be homeowners largely in the dark about whether what is usually the biggest purchase of a lifetime could be a safe bet or a high-risk nightmare like Fischetti’s.

FEMA has flood info but you can’t see it

FEMA, which runs the National Flood Insurance Program, has more information on flooded homes and buildings than any entity in America – thanks largely to mortgage lenders requiring policies for any homes in flood zones.

FEMA not only knows if a claim has been previously filed at a specific insured home, it also can pinpoint properties at the highest risk. After a string of expensive claims, homes like Fischetti’s can even be internally designated as “repetitive loss” or “severe repetitive loss,” which both spikes the cost of insurance and puts those properties on a ticking clock. Eventually, FEMA can cancel insurance unless a home is razed and rebuilt to higher standards.

But the agency keeps that critical information secret from the public and prospective home buyers, redacting specific addresses from any data it releases to the public.

Individual homeowners can request details on past claims, but there’s a big catch. It’s available only after they already own the place and also pay for a flood insurance policy.

For some unfortunate homeowners, the discovery of undisclosed flooding can come as an expensive shock.

Take Jesse Carl Smith IV of St. Petersburg. According to his ongoing civil lawsuit, he bought a home near the water after the sellers told him there had only been slight flooding in the past. When he purchased federal flood insurance, he was shocked to learn there was actually nine inches of water inside the house that cost more than $30,000 to repair. Worse, it was just one of five previous floods.

His insurance bill hit nearly $8,000 a year – a $5,000 jump from what the sellers told him to expect, according to court filings in a lawsuit against the sellers.

“He never would have paid the amount for the house if he had known it would be a severe repetitive loss and it would consistently flood,” said Kristin Rhodus, Smith’s attorney. “It’s not the same value of a home that’s not flooded.”

Industries long resisted universal disclosure

Jeff Jackson, FEMA’s deputy assistant administrator for federal insurance, told the Herald that federal privacy law keeps claims information as secret as a Social Security number. But, he also said FEMA agrees there could be benefits in making it more widely available.

“We would love nothing more than to be able to release this information,” Jackson said. “We think it would greatly increase the flood information for the public.”

Home building and real estate industries, two economic and political powerhouses, have pushed back on broad national disclosure proposals over the years — including one from FEMA itself to require all insured homeowners to reveal past flood claims to buyers.

In comments submitted in 2022 to FEMA over the concept, the National Association of Homebuilders explicitly said it didn’t want past insurance claims included in any mandatory disclosure, only whether the home is in a flood zone and requires flood insurance — which is already publicly available information.

The National Association of Realtors, in similar comments, long argued that existing state laws and legal rulings provided adequate protection for buyers. That guiding law in Florida, real estate attorneys say, is largely based on a state Supreme Court decision issued 40 years ago that leaves it up to sellers to disclose flooding histories — which could cost them in a sale.

The realtors association wields considerable influence in Tallahassee. It’s the biggest real-estate-related donor to the Florida Legislature, according to data compiled by Open Secrets. In 2024 alone, the association gave $86 million to Florida lawmakers, many of whom also have direct ties to the real estate industry. In 2023, at least 66 out of 159 Florida lawmakers were realtors, land-use lawyers, homebuilders and other real-estate related positions.

Austin Perez, a senior policy representative for the group, said the industry believes there are numerous problems with a broad national disclosure mandate, starting with added paperwork in a process that already produces stacks of it for a single home purchase. Asking the federal government to monitor flood disclosures, he said, would be “like having Batman handle traffic tickets.”

“From our point of view, requiring a federal flood disclosure form is an unnecessary burden that does not help homeowners,” he said.

But following a series of disastrous and expensive floods in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, the industry has also recently begun to soften its stance on disclosure.

The association, Perez said, now supports what would be a massive move toward broader disclosure — having FEMA openly post information on federally insured properties.

“FEMA has this treasure trove of information about flood risk to properties. What we don’t understand is why can’t I just go to FEMA’s website, plug in an address and get all the claims?” Perez said.

Real estate agents are expected to know home markets, prices and the nuances of the purchase process, but the industry doesn’t want the responsibility of assessing climate and flood risks.

“Real estate professionals are not flood risk experts,” Perez said.

In the most significant shift, the Florida chapter of the realtors association began openly lobbying for a flood disclosure bill in Florida. This year, the group pushed to close the loopholes in a first measure that passed last year — helping it breeze through the Legislature.

Critics — including Joel Scata, lead attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and an expert on flood disclosure — believe money, not red tape concerns, has driven the real estate industry’s shift toward more disclosure in Florida. Chief among them: There have been potentially messy questions of liability and lawsuits if a previous flood wasn’t disclosed — who knew what and when? — that agents would like to avoid.

Still, disclosure comes with potential and literal costs. Making flood histories public could make homes harder to sell and potentially sink property values for tens of thousands of homeowners. Scata likens disclosure avoidance to a game of reverse musical chairs.

”The last one with the chair is the one with the flooded house,” he said.

Assessing the cost of disclosure likely varies from state to state and home to home. A study last year by federal mortgage giant Fannie Mae found that after Texas passed its law in 2020, properties newly required to disclose their flood risk saw property values fall about 4% relative to others nearby. The impact of Florida’s new disclosure law remains to be seen, but to date, past flooding seems to have done little to cool off prices — at least in South Florida’s red-hot real estate market.

Flood damage, of course, can be repaired, and many homes hit by off-the-chart events like Fort Lauderdale’s 2023 rain bomb or unnamed tropical deluges that have flooded Miami-Dade communities from Little Havana to Sweetwater aren’t all necessarily high risk. But universal disclosure advocates like Scata say, at the very least, red flags should be waved for the buying public on properties that have flooded over and over in less-than-extreme weather.

“It’s not necessarily the disclosure that’s going to ruin your property value; it’s the fact that you flood repeatedly,” he said. “We’re trying to avoid someone getting left holding the bag on a property that floods.”

Flooding confidential

The veil of secrecy over flood history — and concerns about disclosure sinking home values — extends beyond FEMA to cover other government agencies across South Florida.

After the massive April rain bomb in 2023 that flooded more than 1,000 homes, major roads and the runways at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, the South Florida Water Management District convened a meeting to float the first-of-its-kind idea of combining forces with local governments to create a comprehensive map of where it consistently floods in South Florida.

Residents can usually point out problem spots in their own neighborhoods. Public works departments also know where the water piles up. And cities have access to FEMA’s secret database of flooded properties. Some cities routinely employ temporary pumps in areas where serious street flooding is persistent, like Miami does in Brickell and sections of downtown.

But after requesting flooding records from municipalities across the region, The Herald found only scattershot efforts to document the issues — or make them public. Miami-Dade County and Fort Lauderdale, for instance, have websites and phone lines where residents can report street and property flooding, but they can’t see where other residents have submitted flooding complaints.

Some smaller communities don’t keep records at all. And the water management district – a state-run agency in charge of the massive network of drainage canals crisscrossing South Florida – also did not regularly track or compile detailed data on serious street flooding, let alone damaged homes.

Part of the district’s plan includes asking residents across the region to submit information about their flood experiences. But a water management district scientist carefully assured the municipalities that much of the data collected from the public wouldn’t be shared with the public that provided it.

“We’re dealing with the sensitivity of flood information,” she said.

The district has declined to share whatever new flood data it has collected from the local governments, citing a contract with a consultant collecting some of the data.

Small steps toward disclosure

In the last few years, flooding history has become a more frequent question from buyers in South Florida, realtors and real estate agents told The Herald. And despite the government secrecy and initial industry reluctance, risk assessment companies like non-profit First Street have made information more readily accessible online. The group’s Flood Factor, which uses risk modeling similar to FEMA’s but also offers more detailed maps and block-by-block analysis, has partnered with popular real estate listing websites like RedFin.

Mounting natural disasters and public pressure has made some states proactive on the issue. In more than a dozen other states, sellers are required by law to disclose past flooding. And they’re not just blue states like California and New York. Louisiana and even Texas — deluged by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 — have enacted some of the strongest flood disclosure laws in the nation.

Florida has long required home and building sellers to reveal specifics about sinkholes and lead paint, but it was not until last year that the Legislature took a small step toward disclosure. Despite having more residents exposed to flooding than any other state in the nation, lawmakers dragged their feet.

But everything changed when the real estate industry decided to formally embrace disclosure.

With the powerful industry shaping the new law, a bipartisan bill finally passed last year. But at its last committee stop, lawmakers without explanation sharply narrowed it, applying it only to sellers who had previously filed a flood insurance claim or received a payout. This left out the vast majority of home sellers.

The bill this year, which has breezed through committees in the House and Senate, is more comprehensive, broadening the reporting requirements and also extending them to the rental market. The bill, crafted with support from the industry, also addresses the big concern of liability, putting the disclosure responsibility more squarely on property owners. If Gov. Ron DeSantis signs it, it will become law in October.

‘The best thing was not to say anything.’

With actual flood records inaccessible or unavailable to the public, disclosure still depends on sellers and agents to be forthcoming about past problems. Some sellers, who may only own a home for a few years, may be ignorant of its past. But the reality is, with so much money at stake in home deals, many others fudge the facts.

There are allegations of that in many lawsuits in Florida. Several cite optional “voluntary” disclosure forms where, despite FEMA records to the contrary, sellers used them to deny past flood damage.

Brendan Haggerty, secretary of the Home Inspector Association of South Florida, encourages homeowners to ask probing questions of sellers and neighbors instead of fully relying on a mostly visual home inspection or a single box-checked disclosure form.

“That piece of paperwork that the real estate agent asks you to fill out isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on,” Haggerty said.

Real estate agents know a previous flood, even one that doesn’t do much damage, is not a good selling point. One seller in Fort Lauderdale who put his home on the market after the rain bomb told The Herald he wondered whether to disclose the four inches that crept into his garage.

“I asked my real estate agent, and she said the best thing was not to say anything,” he said.

He didn’t mention it, and the buyers didn’t ask.

Some buyers and real estate agents also look for loopholes that might be technically legal but shady. In Shore Acres, a flood-plagued neighborhood in St. Petersburg, Liane Jamason said she has grown used to seeing streets lined with people’s soggy belongings. Then, after investors snap them up cheap and repair the damage, that wet furniture gets replaced with “For Sale” signs.

“I know for a fact they didn’t disclose. They use the language ‘seller has never occupied’ as if that clears them,” she said. “Those of us who live in the neighborhood know exactly what houses have flooded around us. To see them go up without any disclosure is like, come on.”

Jamason, who’s been a real estate agent for 19 years, said she goes above and beyond to explain risks to potential buyers, saying “they have a right to know,” even if it might affect property values. In one case, when a potential buyer wondered if the home had flooded in a previous storm, Jamason joined them in knocking on a neighbor’s door to find out.

“There’s always going to be bad apples that try to get away with it and hope they won’t get sued,” she said.

Winning lawsuits but not money

Even with a new, state-mandated form for disclosing flooding, there is still the question of enforcing the rule. In many cases, disputes may wind up where they always did — in court.

A lawsuit has always been the big gun against dishonest disclosures touted by the real estate industry. Those cases have long been argued under a 1985 Florida Supreme Court ruling that dictates that sellers have to disclose “facts materially affecting the value of the property which are not readily observable and are not known to the buyer.” That, the ruling decreed, includes flooding.

But that option often winds up more trouble than it is worth.

Fischetti, for instance, thought about it but decided against suing the people she bought her home from.

“Other than hearsay, what do I have to say they flooded?” she said. “It’s not worth paying an attorney for and not knowing whether you’re going to get the money.”

A Miami Herald review of lawsuits statewide and interviews with multiple lawyers who handle such cases suggests it’s not a common or easy choice.

Joshua Burnett, a construction defect lawyer in the Tampa Bay area, has two such cases moving through the courts now. But he said that most of the time, after prospective clients call and explain their case, they realize the cost and complication are just too much.

“You’ve got people trying to sell their homes for as much as they can sell them, and they know they’re not going to get the highest price if there’s a flooding issue,” he said. “So they lie on the front end, and they lie later on.

“Unfortunately, some of these folks bank on the fact that litigation would be a very expensive thing for folks to pursue.”

Even winning cases don’t necessarily pay off.

Heather Gaker pursued a lawsuit in 2019 when her “dream home” in Palm Beach County flooded in Hurricane Irma. Afterward, FEMA told her it was the fourth reported flood there and that she would have to tear it down and rebuild it higher. That was news to Gaker, who said she was assured by the sellers and real estate agent that there was no history of flooding.

She sued and won. But when she tried to collect, she found the sellers had filed for bankruptcy, and the realty company failed to pay up too.

“If I had known what was going to happen, no way on earth I would have gone near this house,” she told The Herald.

Why history is so important

That’s why access to the actual history could be so critical. Take, for an extreme example, the case of Ashley Bowman.

On move-in day, a new neighbor knocked on the door of Bowman’s tree-shrouded Fort Lauderdale home to inform her that her $400,000 piece of paradise was known on the block as “the flood house.”

Weeks after that unsettling news, Bowman’s partner fell through some rotting floorboards, souvenirs from past floods, she said. Then, less than a year in, that 2023 “rain bomb” exploded and a stunned Bowman found herself floating on a cold, wet mattress in four feet of water in the bedroom.

If Bowman had known its history, “I never would have bought this home.”

She didn’t go in without doing some research. Her home sat a few blocks out of a FEMA zone that would have required mandatory insurance. First Street’s online Flood Factor ranked her house just a 4 out of 10 for flooding risk, a moderate chance over 30 years. Neither she nor her realtor remember anything about flooding in the pre-sale paperwork.

One thing not on her checklist? Asking the neighbors.

The one who warned her, Elizabeth Corales, said the whole neighborhood of Melrose Manors had suffered from repeated street and house flooding. She recalled that after another earlier flood, the previous owner of Bowman’s home said her father was in town to repair the damage so they could sell the property.

“They knew. They said they were getting out of that house,” Corales said. “They would do anything just to sell their house.”

The previous homeowners, who now live out of state, and their Fort Lauderdale-based realtor did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Bowman pursued a lawsuit but dropped it after she realized the cost of chasing down nonresponsive out-of-state defendants.

Even if the home had not had previous flooding, the rain bomb almost certainly would have ruined it. Floodwaters lifted sheets of plywood Bowman and her partner had used to cover holes in the rotted floor, backed up toilets and soaked several feet of drywall. A few months later, a condemnation notice from the city made it official. Bowman would need to tear it down and start over if she wanted to live there.

Beyond the $400,000-plus sales price, she had poured tens of thousands into renovation and repair. An appraisal revealed it was now worth the price of the land under it: maybe $200,000, if she was lucky. A climate catastrophe had morphed into a personal financial disaster.

Her troubles have spiraled since. Last month, Bowman was arrested on charges of drunk driving and manslaughter in Pompano Beach, near a condominium she had rented while the bank foreclosed on her flood-damaged home.

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