A new standard published by ASTM International in late 2024 is setting a new best practice for how commercial properties should be assessed for natural hazards, extreme weather, and flood risks – and most of the industry hasn’t looked at it yet.
The standard, ASTM E3429-24, establishes a disciplined process for property resilience assessment, covering the full range of natural hazard exposures that affect commercial buildings. It is the first ASTM standard to directly address the gap between what commercial real estate due diligence currently examines and what modern hazard data makes it possible to see.
Albert Slap, founder of RiskFootprint
, has been making this argument for the better part of a decade. His company provides automated hazard assessments on commercial properties, covering 34 distinct hazard categories at the building level. The ASTM standard, he says, gives the industry a formal framework for what responsible due diligence now looks like. Most lenders and consultants, he adds, are still operating as if it doesn’t exist. “Most continue to sit on the fence and do it the old way,” Slap says.
What the Old Way Misses
Standard commercial due diligence relies on four primary inputs: an appraisal, a Phase One Environmental Site Assessment, a FEMA flood map, and in some regions, a basic earthquake score. The Phase One is the most commonly misunderstood. Despite the name, it deals exclusively with hazardous substances, petroleum products, and underground storage tanks. Wind, wildfire, hail, rainfall-driven flooding, storm surge, and tsunami are outside its scope entirely.
That omission carries legal weight. U.S. courts have begun treating extreme weather events as foreseeable rather than exceptional. When a property floods or burns in circumstances that available data could have predicted, the question of what a due diligence professional knew – or should have known – becomes a legal one.
Environmental and engineering consultants who attach a FEMA flood map to a Phase One report may be creating a specific liability exposure. FEMA maps were built around riverine flood risk and do not model rainfall-driven flooding, which is only one of several mechanisms by which commercial buildings flood. RiskFootprint expands on that FEMA foundation by integrating additional flood modeling from Fathom/Swiss Re, giving consultants and lenders a more complete picture of actual flood exposure.
Scale of the Market
The scope of the problem is measurable. Approximately 325,000 commercial real estate transactions in the U.S. each year require a Phase One Environmental Site Assessment, a market that, by Slap’s analysis, is almost entirely underserved by comprehensive hazard assessment.
RiskFootprint reports are delivered as full-color, 34+ hazard assessments for a few hundred dollars per property, making building-level natural hazard data accessible on any deal, regardless of size.
The ASTM standard gives lenders, buyers, and consultants a formal basis for looking beyond what has always been considered sufficient. Whether they act on it is a question that the courts – and the next major weather event – may eventually answer for them.
About RiskFootprint: RiskFootprint is a property resilience assessment platform that provides science-driven hazard analysis across 34+ natural hazard categories for commercial and residential clients. Built to align with ASTM Property Resilience Assessment (PRA) methodologies, it helps building owners, purchasers, lenders, and due diligence professionals identify and evaluate risk at the deal level. Learn more at riskfootprint.com.