House General & Housing committee leans to concur with Senate change: sellers to give buyers FEMA flood maps

MAY 27 — The House Committee on General & Housing signaled May 27 that it will concur with a Senate amendment to H.106, a bill about seller disclosures for properties in FEMA-mapped flood hazard areas. In a straw poll, committee members indicated support for replacing a seller’s affirmative statement about a property’s flood-map status with a requirement that sellers provide buyers a physical or electronic copy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM) or a notice that the map is unavailable.

The change shifts the seller’s role from declaring whether a property is in a mapped flood hazard area to furnishing the official FEMA map or a link to it. Cameron Wood, legislative counsel, told the committee the House-passed version required sellers to tell buyers whether the property was within a FEMA-mapped flood hazard area and included a statutory defense if a seller, after a reasonable attempt, could not determine map status and had notified the buyer of that inability. He said the Senate amendment adds an intent section and instead directs sellers to provide the FEMA map to buyers.

"This is the public policy that we're trying to accomplish by doing it, and it can give the courts information to understand and help justify why you're making changes retroactively," Cameron Wood said while explaining why the Senate inserted an intent provision, though he noted the Senate did not make the change retroactive.

Under the Senate proposal, the bill would also retain the existing disclosure that a seller must tell a buyer whether the property was subject to flooding while the seller owned it and whether the seller maintains flood insurance or is required by federal or state law to maintain such insurance. The amendment sets the bill’s effective date to Sept. 1, 2025, rather than immediate effect on passage.

Committee members asked how the change interacts with disclosure rules the legislature adopted last year. Wood said Act 181 placed similar notice requirements in the residential rental chapter, requiring landlords to disclose in rental agreements if any portion of a premise lies in a FEMA-mapped special flood hazard area and requiring mobile-home-park owners to notify whether a lot is wholly or partially in a flood hazard area. He said the Department of Housing and Community Development is required to develop a model notice form for those cases.

Committee member Ashley asked whether the department could include an "unable to determine" option on the model form; Wood said he saw nothing in the statute that would prevent that. The committee also discussed the separate disclosure duty that applies when a seller actually knows a property has flooded: actual knowledge triggers an obligation to disclose, while mere lack of knowledge does not.

Peter Tucker, speaking for the Vermont Association of Brokers, supported the amendment and said handing buyers an official map is consistent with other consumer notices. "If we do that with drinking water, if there's a well, we do it with lead paint," Tucker said, adding that providing the map places the buyer on notice and allows buyers or their agents to follow up with further inquiries. Tucker also warned that FEMA’s capacity to update maps may be strained, saying FEMA had recently reduced staff and undergone leadership changes — a point he raised as context for concerns about map availability.

The committee took a straw poll to concur with the Senate amendment; the chair counted committee members in favor and said nine raised their hands. The session did not record a formal roll-call vote or a binding committee motion; members described the result as concurrence by straw poll.

If enacted as amended, H.106 would require that sellers give buyers direct access to the FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map for the property’s community or provide notice that the map is unavailable, preserve the duty to disclose known flooding history while the seller owned the property, and keep the seller-insurance disclosure. The Department of Housing and Community Development would continue to develop model forms for other rental- and mobile-home-related disclosures under existing law.

The committee finished without taking formal action before the floor session and scheduled additional hearings for related housing topics the next day, including a 1 p.m. panel on dilapidated and vacant homes.