Iowa Homeowners Find it Hard to Sell Homes Dues to High Flood Insurance Rates

The high price of flood insurance can make it difficult for some Iowa residents to sell their homes.

The Quad-City Times reports Duane Randleman has been trying to sell for a year-and-a-half and showed his house to more than 60 families.

But prospective buyers don’t like the idea of paying $200 a month in flood insurance for the Bettendorf home.

Randleman said his flood insurance expense doubled shortly after he bought the house in 2012 for $144,000 because of a law Congress approved. That has made it difficult to afford living there.

“A lot of people around here were talking about walking away from their mortgages,” Randleman said. “Doubling that payment already set us back to where we were barely able to make it; in fact, we weren’t making it.”

Randleman’s neighborhood is next to Greenway Creek, which flows into Duck Creek. The area is within what emergency officials call a 100-year flood plain, which signifies that there is a 1 percent chance of a major flood in any given year.

Neighbor Barbara James said she panics every time it rains because she remembers losing most of her possessions in a 1990 flood. At the time, James didn’t have flood insurance to cover the damage.

“We weren’t able to save anything, including my vehicle, which was sitting in the garage,” said James, who had to be carried out of her house then because her foot was in a cast.

After those floods, James said she considered walking away from the home and her mortgage. But she stayed put and paid off her mortgage in 2012.

“I thought about it,” she said. “But where was I going to go? I was stuck with this mortgage, so I just stayed here.”