FHA Condo Approvals – Updated FEMA Site
One of the requirements for obtaining a HUD approval for a condominium project is to provide a flood map. This is the means whereby HUD determines if flood insurance is needed.
Providing a flood certificate is not sufficient to satisfy this requirement.
Luckily, it is easy to obtain a copy of the flood map from FEMA for free. Flood maps are available for viewing on its site and can be located at http://msc.fema.gov.
To search for a flood map, use this panel on upper-left of the page:
This is part of the update to the site, albeit a small one. The next part is going to save me hours during the remainder of the year.
Previous to the changes, when I opened a flood map I would have to determine on which area of the map the subject property is located. To do this, I would pull up the property on Google Maps and use geographical markers, such as roads, lakes and rivers, to determine the relative location on the FEMA map.
This becomes especially difficult when the flood map is not a satellite image so the buildings cannot even be seen!
Now, when I input the address, the next page displays where on the flood map the property is located, like the picture below. The blue shaded area represents the map so our subject is at the top, near the center of the map.
To access the actual flood map, click on the hyperlink containing the firm panel ID. In this case it’s 09003C0491F. This will take you to the page where you can either buy or view the actual flood map.
If part of the condominium project had fallen above the blue shaded area, we can see the ID for the map that we would need to access in blue letters. We would go back to first screen to the box as pictured above and click on "FIRM Panel ID" to input the map ID as noted in this picture.
The last step would be to zoom into the panel so that we can clearly see our property, print the picture and outline the property boundary. Be sure that HUD can clearly see the property and that the picture that you print contains which Flood Zone in which the property lies.
Finally, handwrite on the map the FIRM Panel ID so that HUD has documentation of which map it is.
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