First Street
Property-level climate risk financial modeling — flood, fire, wind, heat and air-quality scores for billions of buildings.
Acquired — still operating
Acquired by MSCI in June 2026 for $120M cash to anchor its physical climate risk business.
About
First Street builds climate-risk scores for individual properties — the kind of data that tells a buyer or lender what flood, wildfire, wind, extreme heat and air-quality exposure a specific address faces over the next 30 years. It began in 2016 as a research nonprofit, the First Street Foundation, founded by Matthew Eby, and made its models public through RiskFactor.com, where anyone could look up a property's climate score for free. Its peer-reviewed, physics-based models powered integrations like Zillow's climate-risk scores on listings (launched late 2025, then pulled back after pushback from realtor groups).
In April 2026 the company expanded beyond real estate into company and infrastructure risk modules aimed at institutional investors. Two months later, MSCI announced it would acquire First Street for $120M in cash to anchor its global physical-climate-risk offering.
What it can do
- Property-level flood, fire, wind, heat scores
- 30-year forward-looking projections
- RiskFactor.com free consumer lookup
- Company and infrastructure risk modules
- API and data licensing for institutions
- Peer-reviewed, physics-based models
Setup
Look up any address free on RiskFactor.com; institutions license the data or API through First Street/MSCI.
Prerequisites
None for the free consumer tool; enterprise license for data feeds and API.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (TIER metrics, metrics-v1). Evidence: 2016 nonprofit founding and Matthew Eby leadership confirmed in MSCI acquisition reporting; $120M cash acquisition by MSCI (June 2026) reported by ESG Today; Zillow integration and realtor backlash covered independently. Strengths: property-level granularity is genuinely differentiated, nonprofit research roots add credibility, free public lookup is unusually transparent. Docked for: (1) model methodology is proprietary despite 'peer-reviewed' framing; (2) real-estate industry pushback shows the scores are contested; (3) now owned by MSCI, which may restrict the free tool's future. License: proprietary data products; free RiskFactor.com lookup, enterprise licensing custom.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 4.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Founded 2016 as research nonprofit (First Street Foundation) by Matthew Eby
- · RiskFactor.com gives free property-level climate scores to consumers
- · Peer-reviewed, physics-based models: flood, fire, wind, heat, air quality
- · Powered Zillow climate scores (late 2025), pulled back after realtor backlash
- · Acquired by MSCI June 2026 for $120M cash
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.