Four numbers, two scenarios
The findings sort cleanly into two scenarios, and keeping them separate is the whole point. In the first, a home sits inside a mapped floodplain but has not recently flooded. In the second, the community has just been through a real flood event.
For the flood scenario, Shrubsole told the webinar that the literature points to about an 8% drop in real estate prices after a flood, alongside slower sales and roughly 44% fewer listings. He added that prices can take approximately one to seven years to recover, depending on the event and the market. For the mapping scenario, he described the reductions as much more modest: from almost nothing to about 1% to 4% of the sale price, in the absence of a recent flood.
He attributed the statistics to studies by Intact and the Bank of Canada. That attribution matters, because these are research findings summarized in a webinar, not a valuation rule. No one should read them as a forecast for a specific address.
The pattern holds on the Great Lakes
Asked about coastal exposure, Shrubsole pointed to work around the Great Lakes, Lake Erie in particular, that found significant sale-price reductions after recent erosion or flooding events. His framing was the same as for rivers. The reduction was tied to the event, not necessarily to the mapping. Different shoreline, same lesson: buyers react to what they can see happen, far more than to what a model says could happen.
