Flood Disclosure in New York: What Sellers and Landlords Must Now Tell Buyers and Tenants

New York's Property Condition Disclosure Act, Real Property Law Article 14, requires sellers of one- to four-family residential property to complete a standard disclosure form (the PCDS) and deliver it to the buyer before a binding contract of sale. Chapter 484 of the Laws of 2023 (A.1967/S.5400) — signed September 22, 2023 and effective March 20, 2024 — rewrote two pieces of that regime. It added a block of flood-specific questions to the disclosure statement itself (Real Property Law §462), and it amended the liability section (§465) to delete the old fallback: previously, a seller who simply skipped the form owed the buyer a $500 credit at closing instead of answering it. That opt-out is gone. A seller who fails to deliver a PCDS — flood questions included — is now exposed to liability for a willful failure to disclose, with no flat-fee shortcut.

A separate law reached leases first. Real Property Law §231-b, effective June 21, 2023, requires landlords to attach a flood history and risk notice to every residential lease — houses, rental buildings, condominiums, and cooperative apartments alike. It runs on its own clock and its own form, distinct from the PCDS, and both duties can apply to the same transaction: an owner who sells a currently tenanted house, or a buyer who becomes a landlord after closing, can face both regimes at different points.

The amended PCDS asks a seller to answer, item by item and honestly to the best of their knowledge: whether the property sits in a FEMA-designated floodplain; whether it lies in FEMA's Special Flood Hazard Area — the '100-year floodplain'; whether it lies in FEMA's moderate risk flood hazard area — the '500-year floodplain'; whether the property is subject to a federal requirement to carry flood insurance; whether the seller has received FEMA or SBA disaster assistance for flood damage; whether the property currently has flood insurance; whether a FEMA elevation certificate exists for the structure; and whether the seller has ever filed an insurance claim for flood damage to the property. Every question carries a yes/no/unknown answer, which matters: the statute does not force a seller to investigate facts they do not already have, only to disclose what they know or reasonably should know — but 'unknown' is a weaker answer to hand a buyer than a sourced one.

The §231-b notice is narrower in scope but no less specific. Landlords must disclose any prior flood damage to the leased premises from a natural flood event — the statute's definition covers heavy rainfall, coastal storm surge, tidal inundation, and river overflow, and pointedly excludes internal failures like a burst pipe or an overflowing tub — that the landlord knows or reasonably should know occurred. They must also disclose whether the premises sits wholly or partly within a FEMA-designated floodplain, within the Special Flood Hazard Area (the 100-year floodplain), and within the moderate risk flood hazard area (the 500-year floodplain).

Every covered lease must also carry a standing notice, regardless of the property's flood status: that flood insurance is available to renters through FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program, and that a standard renter's insurance policy typically does not cover flood damage. That half of the disclosure is not conditional on the landlord's knowledge — it is boilerplate every residential lease in New York must now carry.

Both disclosure regimes ask about status and severity, not just a checkbox — and honest answers require more than a memory of the last storm. Flood-zone status has to be read against the parcel's actual mapped geometry, not a ZIP code or a neighbor's insurance bill, and it matters how much of the lot the zone actually covers, not just whether any of it touches the line. Base flood elevation — the height FEMA's maps expect the benchmark flood to reach — and how a structure's grade sits against it, its freeboard, turn a bare zone answer into a depth answer, which is what actually predicts loss. And because a large share of New York City's realized flood damage happens from stormwater flooding that never touches a mapped FEMA zone at all, an honest disclosure often benefits from area flood-loss history and local stormwater exposure alongside the federal zone determination — not instead of it.

PearlAudit's property dossier reports exactly this stack of facts for a given parcel: the FEMA-effective flood-zone designation with the percentage of the lot the zone actually covers, the base flood elevation where FEMA has mapped one, a grade-versus-BFE freeboard read, New York City's own stormwater flood-scenario exposure — the pluvial risk that sits outside mapped FEMA zones — and realized flood-loss history for the surrounding area from federal claims records. Each figure ships with its source and its as-of date, because a disclosure form is only as good as the record behind it. None of this substitutes for legal advice or for a seller's or landlord's own knowledge of the property's actual flood history — it is the sourced, dated evidence a seller, landlord, or their attorney can check the disclosure-form answers against.