“The industry didn’t seem to be pricing in these kinds of risks,” said Mary Ludgin, senior managing director and head of global investment research at Heitman. “When we began the project of trying to identify the climate risk inherent in individual properties, we first looked to our insurers. They were less of a help than we were expecting.”

That is because insurers reprice annually, and therefore do not look at long-term models. FEMA flood plains are reassessed about every five years, but they still don’t account for the increasingly extreme weather and heavier rainfall that parts of the United States are now seeing.

“We can’t try to determine what’s going to happen in 12 months beyond, because insurance is set up for what your risk is today. And it wouldn’t meet actuarial science to charge you for a future potential,” said David Maurstad, FEMA’s deputy associate administrator for federal insurance and mitigation and chief executive of the National Flood Insurance Program.

Heitman is, therefore, going beyond traditional insurance predictions to factor climate risk into its investments. It hired a Berkeley, California-based firm called 427, one of a new cottage industry of companies that assess climate risk to real estate. It’s mission, according to the website, is to catalyze climate adaptation and resilience investments by enabling the integration of climate science into business and policy decisions.

“They were able to provide us an assessment of flooding, wildfires, wind-related disasters, and we can then aggregate that up to what is Heitman’s total exposure globally or a specific client’s exposure on the individual buildings they own. They can assess potential acquisitions and the risk that they represent,” said Ludgin.

These risks include not just the destruction from individual natural disasters but business disruptions for property tenants and higher operating and capital costs caused by increased wear and tear on properties from more extreme weather.

As a whole, the industry needs to understand the pricing impacts of physical climate risks, and how climate change is likely to have a bigger impact on valuation in the future as asset and market liquidity are affected, the ULI report says.

And it’s not just storms and sea level rise, but the potential higher costs associated with protecting cities and municipalities from both. In Miami, for example, the city is investing $200 million into resilience, installing pump stations and upgrading its infrastructure. Miami Beach is on track to spend twice that, raising sidewalks and seawalls. The money is coming from new bonds — voters raising their own property taxes to protect their property.

“Are taxes going to rise?” asked Ludgin. “We are looking at scenarios where taxes quadruple in the period that we hold the property. You can assume that federal, state, and local governments will play a role, and that means a climate in which taxes are likely rising.”

All of it is a new and now necessary part of what real estate investors, developers and managers need to do to factor opportunity against risk.

“They are trying to think about how their portfolio is balanced and make sure they’re not overexposed in a market that has more risk,” said Walter. “Not redlining markets, but investors are trying to be thoughtful about the level of exposure to those markets.”

That is because higher-risk assets will eventually see downward repricing, as the market redirects capital to locations and individual assets where it is expected to be better insulated from these particular risks, the ULI report said.

— CNBC’s Erica Posse and Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this report