Interactive Natural Hazard Risk Dashboard for Mortgages Now Live via UMD Smith

COLLEGE PARK, Md., Oct. 24, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- An interactive, online tool to assess natural hazard-related risks to residential mortgage borrowers across the United States—developed at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business—is now live.

The Mortgage Natural Hazard Analyzer is produced and facilitated by Master of Quantitative Finance students led by Professor of the Practice and Smith Enterprise Risk Consortium Director Clifford Rossi.

The Tableau-based dashboard "can be a critical asset to policymakers, credit investors, insurance companies and other interested parties to interactively examine the impact of different hazards on homeowners including drill downs on financially vulnerable borrowers," says Rossi, who is credited with developing the mortgage industry's first statistically based automated underwriting scorecards for FHA and VA loans, during a previous tenure at Freddie Mac. 

"The home often is the most valuable asset an individual will have, and with the number and intensity of extreme weather events on the rise, the availability and cost associated with homeowners' insurance is moving toward becoming a major crisis in this country," he says. 

Insurance premium increases and policy nonrenewal spell trouble for homeowners, as retaining property insurance typically is a condition of their mortgage. Earlier this year, climate risk financial modeling firm First Street projected $5.4 billion in lender losses from mortgage foreclosures by 2035. And Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently told Congress, "If you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage."

So, to provide a comprehensive resource for industry stakeholders, Rossi and his students created the new dashboard based on 13 million single-family mortgage loans and merged this with FEMA's National Risk Index tool for all 78,000 U.S. Census tracts across 18 different climate hazards, including earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, coastal and river flooding, tornados and drought.

They subsequently and randomly selected one million mortgage loans and used a battery of different machine learning models and performance statistics to analyze the data, looking for such effects as adverse selection against GSEs Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, impact on low- and moderate-income borrowers, minorities and other key effects.

The resulting dashboard allows the user to point and click on any county in the U.S. for any climate hazard type and get figures on borrower characteristics such as race, age and income. "Lenders, insurance companies, and policymakers all could use this information during the underwriting process and for figuring out which areas need more government resources and-or intervention," Rossi says.

The new dashboard evolved from Rossi leading his students in an experiential learning project for Freddie Mac, which currently holds a $3.6 trillion mortgage portfolio. "Senior leaders at Freddie Mac were impressed with the extent and complexity of the students' analysis, and their ability to explain difficult concepts, calling the presentation better than some by employees and consultants," Rossi says, adding "the work also illustrates Smith students producing analysis that's real-time and impactful to markets."

The dashboard is accessible in a free, public version on SERC's website.

About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business
The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and flex MBA, executive MBA, online MBA, business master's, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations in North America and Asia.

Contact: Greg Muraski, [email protected]

SOURCE University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business