Two houses on the same Florida street can carry completely different flood costs, and you can't see it from the listing. I don't invest here myself, I build small data tools, and this is the kind of thing that jumps out once you start pulling the public insurance data.

Flood is a separate policy from your homeowners, priced off the FEMA flood zone. A house in an X zone might run a few hundred a year through NFIP. Move one block toward the water into an AE or VE zone and the same house can run a few thousand, sometimes more. Nothing on Zillow tells you which side of that line a property sits on.

For an out of state buyer that is the kind of number that quietly breaks a DSCR. You budget the homeowners premium, you close, and then the flood quote shows up and the deal you underwrote is not the deal you have.

The FEMA maps are public, you just have to pull the zone for the exact parcel. So here is the offer: if you are about to write on a Florida rental and want the flood zone before you are under contract, drop the address, or even just the city and street, and I'll tell you the zone and roughly what NFIP tends to run there. Mostly I'm curious how often this catches people.