Earlier this year, we pitched a few hedge funds. If billions in real estate assets they manage are exposed to big, hairy, scary climate and environmental risks — why not bankroll the incubation of a company that’d scream bloody murder the moment things seem to face getting roasted, soaked, or haunted by Mother Nature?

During advanced talks, the final pushback was academic: Markets were efficient and everyone would use this information exactly once. I didn’t buy it. Mother Nature ping-pongs, and not exactly once.

The risk for the entity was actually simpler: data.

I naively bet the deep pockets would help buy the data. But this would be doing what insurance does – where they buy from a duopoly of data providers. The results have pretty much been a disaster as and has said insurance companies have had to flee certain markets.

Enter Zillow

The New York Times recently wrote about a different wrath - Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings. Real estate sellers are mad that Zillow is giving their houses a flood score that will make it impossible to sell or get the real value of their house.

“It’s like they’re trying to drive down property values,” said one seller in Florida, who asked to be identified only as “a very concerned homeowner.”

I see this point. These are models and their methodology could point out to a house inaccurately or using probabilities – which most of us human beings just do not do well with as the numbers tend to sound absolute versus chance-ful.

But should we abolish Rotten Tomatoes for movies? Ignore the little health inspections for restaurants? Or happily match into a dentist with a 1 out of 5 rating?

No. There is an inevitability to what is happening. The company involved has a clear understanding & transparency of the methodology that they use, but then lacks specificity because they have no longitudinal data on which houses actually flooded, when and where.

This sounds eerily familiar.

It’s all about the data, the right kind

When your house floods, there are those calls you make to the local folks who can help you. The inquiry logs, quotes, and eventual inspection are all records that most likely end up in cabinets or in the shredder. They are recorded as sales by the service provider. And a memory best left distant by the home owner.

But they hold a treasure trove of important core signals of geographical areas where flooding could be happening or likely to happen. It is thus in these “boring” businesses that the most accurate and reliable data lives. And the innovation is on how to make these businesses keep doing their work while actually powering physical intelligence.