A recent Canadian Press article published by CTV on climate risk and house shopping highlights a quiet but important shift underway in Canada’s housing market: flood risk is no longer a secondary concern. It is becoming a first-order consideration for buyers, homeowners, and real estate professionals alike.
The article notes practical red flags, like basement vulnerabilities, alongside a deeper structural problem: flood risk information in Canada remains fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult for the public to interpret. As extreme rainfall becomes more common, that lack of transparency is itself a source of risk.
Flood risk transparency is not the end goal. But it is the necessary beginning.
Why transparency comes first
As the article makes clear, most people don’t realize they are exposed to flood risk until after a loss. In most cities, the dominant driver of damage is surface water overwhelming stormwater systems that were designed for a different climate and much less rainfall.
Without clear, asset-level information, buyers are forced to guess, owners are forced to react, and asset managers are forced to spread capital thinly across portfolios. Credible flood risk transparency changes that. When risk is visible and specific, it becomes something that can be planned for rather than feared.
This is true for an individual homeowner deciding whether to install a backflow valve, and it is equally true for a real estate asset manager deciding where resilience capital will have the greatest impact.
Resilience is mostly practical and affordable
One of the most hopeful takeaways from the article is how ordinary many effective solutions are. Grading, drainage, sump pumps, sewer backflow valves, alarms, and routine maintenance account for a large share of avoided losses. These are not speculative technologies or massive infrastructure projects. They are sensible interventions applied where they matter most.
For homeowners, the cost of these upgrades is often far less than a single uninsured flood event. For asset managers, targeted mitigation routinely outperforms cosmetic renovations in preserving long-term value and insurability.
The challenge has never been a lack of solutions. It has been a lack of clarity about which solutions are needed, where, and why.
Individual action and collective responsibility
The Canadian Press article also underscores a critical point: not all flood risk can or should be managed at the individual property level. Many losses occur because of system-wide failures, like undersized storm sewers, blocked flow paths, or downstream bottlenecks that no single homeowner can fix.
This is where flood risk transparency becomes a coordination tool for cities and government agencies. When risks are mapped consistently across neighbourhoods and communities, it becomes possible to distinguish what should be addressed collectively through municipal investment from what can be handled individually through property-level upgrades.
That distinction is essential for effective resilience. It prevents overburdening homeowners with problems they cannot solve alone, while also avoiding public investments that could be more efficiently addressed at the asset level.
Resilience by design
Resilience is not about eliminating risk. It is about understanding it well enough to manage it intelligently.
The hopeful message for homeowners and real estate asset managers is this: most flood losses are preventable, most solutions are sensible, and most investments are affordable. What has been missing is not capability, but transparency.
Flood risk transparency is the starting point. From there, resilience stops being an abstract aspiration and becomes a design problem that can be addressed step by step, property by property, and city by city.
That is how resilience is built: not through blind hope, but through intelligent design.