by Jordan Wolman, CommonWealth Beacon
December 2, 2025
DENISE KRESS HAS been living for 35 years with the Belle Isle Marsh as her backyard.
But as more severe storms hit over the past decade, her life has been consumed by the marsh in ways other than its natural beauty: thinking about water, preparing for its encroachment, laying down bags of sand, living through flooding, and recovering from its wreckage. It’s meant two totaled cars and five repaired or replaced electrical and heating systems, and weeks spent in a hotel in the winter of 2018 after flood waters breached her basement twice in two months and then froze so that you’d need a “pick axe” to navigate it.
Through all this, she’s stayed.
But Kress occasionally ponders what it will look like, when the day comes, to sell her house just over the Boston border in Winthrop, given all the flooding the property has endured.
“I can’t worry about it because there’s little that I can do about it,” Kress said when asked if she’s concerned that disclosing her home’s flooding history could impact its value. “But I would want the next owner to know. People have a right to know.”
She’s quick to add, though, that even if she had known all the flood damages and insurance price hikes that would come in her 35 years in Winthrop, she may not have changed a thing anyway: “If I had to do it all over again, I probably would,” said Kress, who finds comfort in the vast marsh that drew her to the property originally.
Such are the complications facing Massachusetts, a high-cost coastal state seeing some of the fastest-warming ocean temperatures in the world and increasing rates of precipitation that are exposing its aging stormwater drainage systems, dams, and culverts.
Gov. Maura Healey aims to direct a new influx of cash to address those very issues through her nearly $3 billion environmental bond bill, which includes $308 million to upgrade high-risk dams and flood control systems and nearly $100 million for coastal initiatives like seawalls, jetties, and beach nourishments. But as flooding touches more Massachusetts households, she’s also proposing a new requirement to steer people out of harm’s way in the first place: mandating flood risk disclosure when property owners sell.
Massachusetts is one of just 14 states in the nation and one of just three located along the coast (Virginia and Georgia are the others) not to require flood disclosures, which are meant to arm prospective homebuyers with knowledge of a property’s past flooding history. Healey’s proposal comes as state leaders push to build more homes to ease high prices, including a goal to construct 220,000 more units by 2035 and a major zoning overhaul designed to increase housing around MBTA rail stops.
“The flood disclosure provision is about consumer protection,” Katherine Antos, the state’s undersecretary for decarbonization and resilience, said in an interview. “Oftentimes, what families pay for their housing, whether they’re making one of the largest financial decisions of buying a home, or if they’re renting, this is a significant portion of their expenses. Making sure that they have available information about flood risk is key to helping them make informed decisions, including ways that they can keep themselves and their property safe.”
Healey’s bill will now need action in the Legislature, and it arrived there earlier this year with broad support from the business community to the insurance industry to municipalities.
But there’s one stakeholder key to the state’s efforts to address both a dire shortage in homes and a growing need to shore up current and future housing stock against flood risk that is keeping mum on the disclosure push: the real estate industry.
Theresa Hatton, CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, said that she’s neutral on the proposed flood disclosure requirement. But she cautioned that moving ahead with the policy would upend Massachusetts’s structure as a “buyer beware” state — meaning the burden falls mostly on the buyer to proactively investigate issues with the home.
“Flooding will affect the price of a home in terms of the insurance that you’ll have to pay,” she said. “In some cases, a buyer may decide, ‘This is not the home for me. I’d rather put this money into my mortgage as opposed to flood insurance.’ And others might say, ‘This is the most beautiful piece of property I’ve ever seen. I’m willing to take the risk and invest in flood insurance.’ To each their own — the more information, the better-informed decision you can make. But this is a systematic change that I don’t believe is the biggest priority to tackle at the moment. Let’s get some more housing built first.”
Daryl Fairweather, chief economist of real estate firm Redfin, told CommonWealth Beacon that she supports mandatory flood disclosures — but acknowledged that “there are people who disagree with me in the real estate industry.”
“If the seller is aware of flood risk and the buyer is not, then that gives an advantage to the seller during the negotiation process,” Fairweather said. “It’s better for there to be more even footing between seller and buyer. And on a more macro level, anything that helps homebuyers make better economic decisions, the more it will help the economy overall. Otherwise, we could have a situation where homebuyers are not at all aware of the risks, they go buying homes with high risk unwittingly, and then they end up needing bailouts from the government or insurance companies.”
Supporters of Healey’s proposal in Massachusetts recognize the real estate industry could play a pivotal role in whether the state is able to enact a flood disclosure requirement. Norman Abbott, senior government affairs specialist at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, said the sector is “an influential group” and that “this may be an issue where we ultimately don’t see eye to eye.”
Sen. Rebecca Rausch, a Democrat who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, declined to say in an interview whether she’s concerned that the real estate industry could serve as a roadblock to the flood disclosure provision.
But she added that “flood risk is only going to increase” — and with that risk comes a potential financial reckoning for property owners.
“So whether [owners are] required to talk about it or not, the value is going to be impacted,” Rausch said.
Joel Scata, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who leads the group’s flood disclosure scorecard project, said real estate agents in other “buyer beware” states have opposed flood disclosure requirements because of a “misconstrued fear that this is going to hamper the real estate industry even though many other states have strong disclosure laws and still have strong real estate markets.”
Luck might play a role, too.
David Melly, a senior policy director at the Environmental League of Massachusetts, said that Massachusetts has avoided the flood disclosure conversation in recent years in part because it has largely been spared from devastating and headline grabbing major hurricanes with statewide impacts. New Jersey and New York, for instance, enacted flood disclosure laws in 2023 in the wake of hurricanes Sandy and Ida that battered those coastlines, flooded subway systems, and knocked out power for a large swath of people for an extended period of time.
Still, between dramatic coastal erosion along bluffs and beaches in the state and crushing inland flooding in communities like Leominster in recent years, Healey’s bond bill would strengthen stormwater management systems and establish a revolving fund to implement upgrades to roads, bridges, dams, and salt marsh restoration projects.
The flood disclosure requirement in particular is one that Carole McCauley wishes had already been in place when she sold her flood-prone Salem home a decade ago.
McCauley, a single mother who used to work in the state’s Office of Coastal Zone Management and is now at Mass Audubon, would often park her car up the street on safer ground because the drains in front of her house would regularly overflow, with water spreading out over the road and bubbling up the sidewalk and onto her front steps. She became accustomed to watching the tide charts daily.
But everything changed when a microburst of intense rain woke her up one morning in October 2011. She ran downstairs to find that three feet of water had poured into her basement, despite three sump pumps, and later learned she had lost a water heater and had her car totaled from the storm.
When McCauley found out a few years later that her mortgage lender was going to require her to purchase flood insurance, McCauley decided it was time to move.
But she didn’t disclose the flooding history to the next owner.
“I felt like a real jerk,” McCauley said. “I remember having a conversation with the realtor, and he’s like, ‘Are you going to disclose?’ He just looked at me, like, ‘I’m your agent, and this is your money. What do you want me to do?’ They’re not making us do it. Hold your nose, and off you go.”
The experience changed her thinking on flooding, climate change, and even capitalism.
“This is not even just about convincing people that science is real and here’s something science is telling us,” McCauley said. “Now we’re telling people that their retirement, their future, their savings is at risk if their property values are impacted. But it is a very painful step in the right direction to require the mandatory disclosures. It’s not going to convince some people – some people can afford the loss, and some people just don’t believe it. But if they don’t believe it, it’s only because they have never lived through what it’s like to have all your family photos gone because they’re soaked in mud.”
The proposed flood disclosure requirement isn’t necessarily just to benefit buyers, either.
Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, said if sellers knew their flood history would be disclosed, they could be nudged into taking additional steps to help mitigate against any damage such disclosures could do to their property value by investing in new gutters, for instance, or redoing their landscaping to navigate water away from the home.
Now, Healey’s flood disclosure proposal will barrel forward into next year and stands to offer an early glimpse into the policy jockeying to come over how Massachusetts handles its growing flood problem.
“Choosing not to disclose isn’t necessarily the answer, because it’s almost like a perverse game of musical chairs,” said Scata, the senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Eventually, someone’s going to be left holding that property that’s untenable because it floods so often.”
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