Millennials looking to buy a home are worrying about climate risk. They're not wrong.

• Over 80% of prospective homebuyers said climate risk impacted their search, Zillow found.
• Millennials registered the highest concern for floods, hurricanes, and droughts across generations.

As greater swaths of the US experience extreme weather events, potential homeowners are becoming more concerned about climate risk.

Over 80% of prospective homebuyers said climate risk impacted their search, Zillow found.

Generationally, millennials are expressing high rates of concern, according to Zillow's annual Consumer Housing Trends report, with 55% of millennials who planned to buy a home within the next year saying climate risks were "very/extremely impactful" on where they planned to purchase.

On the topic of flooding, 42% of these prospective millennial buyers said it was on their minds; for hurricanes, it was 36%; for extreme temperatures, 44% were concerned.

While millennials logged higher concern over climate issues than their Gen Z counterparts, it turns out millennials' budget is often putting them in the path of climate risk. Zillow found 36% of millennial buyers were considering moving to an area with "greater climate risk'" compared with 19% of Gen Zers.

With mortgage rates over 7%, homebuyers are continuing to prioritize affordability, Manny Garcia, Zillow's senior population scientist, told Insider.

"Folks are chasing a home that they can afford and oftentimes those homes are not in the most climate resilient parts of the country," Garcia said. A lot of new housing is being built in Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas, he added.

"Generally the South as a whole has a lot more housing inventory" compared with "Western markets or the Northeast, where you might be paying $1 million for a home that's 100 years old," he said.

Overall, owning a home in disaster-prone areas is becoming trickier as insurers are pulling back from offering the kinds of coverage that are becoming more needed than ever, Insider previously reported. Insurance companies are adjusting their models based on the shifting frequency and scale of natural disasters.

In Florida, Bob Stephens told Insider it feels like "living on the Titanic." Currently, the state-backed Citizens Insurance plan does not cover homes that would cost more than $1 million to rebuild, leaving Stephens' $3 million property in a lurch.

"You know you're going down. How are you going to stop it?" he said.

A report from First Street Foundation released Wednesday found states such as California, Florida, and Louisiana, which are prone to wildfires, damaging storms, and flooding, are likely to see the most dramatic increases in premiums, AP reported. But the fire that destroyed the Hawaiian community of Lahaina in August, as well as the historic flooding that happened in Vermont and Maine in July, are examples of events that could drive up insurance costs for homeowners in other states.

"Some places may be impacted very minimally, but other places could see massive increases in insurance premiums in the coming years," Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street and a co-author of the report, told AP. First Street is a New York-based nonprofit that researches the financial impact of the climate crisis.

While the intensity of wildfires, floods, and storms can vary from year to year, the trend lines in these models point to more wildfire activity as well as more intense storms, all likely to result in more catastrophic amounts of damage that insurance companies will have to cover, AP said.

Factoring in climate models and acres estimated to be burned, First Street estimates that by 2050, roughly 34,000 homes will burn down because of wildfires every year, AP said, which is roughly the equivalent of losing the city of Asheville, North Carolina, every year.

"It used to be homeowner's insurance was an afterthought when you are looking at buying a property. Now you'll really need to do your research into what risks there may be in that property in the coming years," Todd Bevington, a managing director at the insurance broker VIU by HUB told AP.