Is Your Florida Land in a FEMA Flood Zone?

https://youtu.be/QQnBROThiLo

In this video, Felicia talks about how to find out if your Florida land is in a FEMA flood zone, understanding the FEMA zone classifications, and whether or not you need flood insurance. If you’re looking for Florida land for sale, knowing whether or not the property is in a flood zone will help you understand its value, what you can use it for, and ultimately help you find the right Florida land for you.

From the video:

Are you looking to buy Florida land and want to make sure your investment doesn’t get washed away?

My name is Felicia I’m a land investor and a partner at Compass Land USA.

We’ve bought and sold hundreds of properties in Florida, and know exactly how to identify if a property is in a FEMA flood zone.

If you give me just a few minutes of your time here I’ll show you how you can quickly find out if your Florida land is in a FEMA flood zone, so you can feel really prepared and comfortable with your next property purchase.

Ok, so it is Florida, obviously flood zones are super common. The whole state is hovering just about sea level. So if you find out that a property you’re looking to purchase is in a flood zone, it’s not a cause for huge alarm.

I’m going to quickly tell you why it’s really important that you check, how to check using some free resources, and then what to do if the property is in a flood zone.

Like we said already, Florida isn’t located high above sea level, so flooding and flood zone occurrence is really common.

Knowing this, you might be thinking, well why should I waste the time to check?

Because a flood zone is a still a risk.

If you are looking at a property and you need traditional financing, like through a bank or credit union, a lot of times, while you’re financing that property, you will also be required to pay for flood insurance.

This is because banks want to mitigate their risk. And right now their risk is your property flooding and losing value while they are lending you money for it.

Flood insurance costs depend on the zone classification. In some cases, it can cost thousands of dollars a year. That’s a lot of money.

Honestly, it’s difficult to get financing through a traditional lender for vacant land to begin with, so a property in a flood zone might just make the whole thing a no go.

Because it’s difficult to get that traditional financing, a lot of land investors like myself will owner finance the property for you. We don’t require you to pay for flood insurance while you’re paying off the property. We also don’t do credit checks, we try to make it as easy as possible for folks on any budget to get their dream property.

So, yes, you need to check for a flood zone, because it’s still a risk and it can make your financing options really expensive or just void them altogether.

Now, how do you check if your Florida property is in a flood zone?

I have a couple of free resources for you to figure this out.

Link to FEMA Flood Zone finder

This is great, this comes directly from FEMA.

So we can search by address. And I have an example property up here, this is a property we own.

So let’s scroll down to the details and grab the address.

I want to point this out really quick, for all of our properties we try to be transparent as possible with details. You can see we have the flood zone listed on our site, and it’s classification.

So we know the answer already, but we can double check in any case.

Jumping back to FEMA.

If you don’t have an exact address, you can either just use the street name, or your second best option is to look at a neighboring parcel, maybe one that has a house on it, and use that address.

Ok, so you can see the map loaded in here, and you see a zone classification. Zone 8AE, it gives you the approximate elevation in feet underneath, about 8 feet.

This map is pretty cool because you can zoom out and see how big the zone is, what the neighboring zones are.

Ok we have the zone! Awesome! But what does that mean?

Well I have this handy cheat sheet for you here. I’ll make sure to put this in the video description as well.

Link to FEMA Flood Zone classifications cheat sheet

So looking for Zoning 8AE, we see that it is a high risk area, and that’s really the only piece of information you need from this sheet. You need to know, am I in a high risk or a low risk area?

This is something you need to know because it will affect your flood insurance. If you’re in a high risk area, you might be required to purchase flood insurance on your house.

If you’re looking to buy Florida land and not build on it for 20, 30 years, just sit on it as an investment, you probably do not need nor will you be required to purchase flood insurance. It’s just vacant land, right?

Housing is different. So, if you’re in a high risk flood zone area, it’s pretty likely that you will be required to purchase flood insurance.

Link to Flood Smart flood insurance requirements

Doing a quick check on the FEMA site here, you can see they agree with that.

If you have any experience with flood zones on vacant land please leave a comment below, or maybe if you can recommend a great insurance company for flood insurance, I would be love to hear your suggestions. 🙂

This site is great by the way. Also on the FEMA site here you’ll see what’s covered by flood insurance, building and contents. What is not covered, looks like anything in a basement is not covered, so that’s good to know.

You can also see the different types of flood insurance, so if you’re the home owner or if you’re a renter.

Then they also have this find a provider tool. It sorts by state, so you have a long list of provider options here.

Ok so there we have it, you know how to find out if your Florida land is in a flood zone, what the classifications of FEMA’s flood zones are, and some insurance options depending on the classification.

I hope you found this video helpful! If you made it this far, thank you so much for watching, and for taking the time to educate yourself on how to become a smarter Florida land buyer.

Please don’t forget to leave a comment, let me know if this was useful for you, leave a question – I’ll reply with your answer. And make sure you subscribe to our channel. We do lots of informative land buying videos like this as well as pretty cool custom property tour videos.

Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll talk to you soon. 🙂