Yes, and not in a small way. About a sixth of postcodes sit in the highest river and sea flood zone. Roughly two thousand properties carry a high risk rating. Nearly a third of the town is within five hundred metres of the coast. The flood map here is not a formality. It is the thing that separates two otherwise identical streets and two very different conversations with an insurer.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea mapping, 16% of the area's postcodes fall in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band, and 1% fall in flood zone 2. Zone 2 is the additional medium-probability fringe lying beyond zone 3, not a wrapper around it, which is why the smaller number is the less serious one. Reading them the other way round is the most common mistake buyers make with this data.
Surface water is not published here as a separate share for the town, so anyone wanting the rainfall-and-drainage picture has to take it inside the combined indicator further down rather than on its own. What is recorded separately is history: historic flood extents cover 4% of the area, and 80 flood events have been logged, the most recent in February 2014, from the sea, by overtopping of defences. That last phrase is worth sitting with. The defences were there.
Looking forward, the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted zone covers 1% of postcodes, an allowance for what the river-and-sea extent is modelled to become rather than what it is today.
For insurance, none of this is theoretical. A property inside a high-risk band can attract higher premiums, a large flood excess, or conditions a lender takes an interest in, and the answer differs street by street rather than town by town. An indicative quote for the exact address, obtained before a solicitor is instructed rather than after, costs nothing and settles the question.
Pulling every measure together, including surface water alongside rivers and sea, 24% of postcodes rate high on at least one flood indicator, 18% rate medium and 35% rate low. Those bands overlap with the zone figures above rather than sitting alongside them, so they cannot be stacked together into a bigger number, however tempting that is.
Counted as buildings rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping puts 4,188 properties in the town at some level of risk. Of those, 2,094 are high, 252 medium, 894 low and 106 very low, with 1,642 of the high-risk ones residential. Only postcodes carrying some risk appear in that list at all, so this is a count of the exposed, not a survey of the whole town.
On whether anything stands between the water and the building, 12% of postcodes sit in a high-risk extent with a defence present in the model and 12% sit in a high-risk extent with no defence modelled at all. A further 15% sit in a low-risk undefended extent. Defended means a structure exists in the modelling, not that the property is safe, and February 2014 is the local demonstration of the difference.
The coast is close by design. Around 29% of postcodes lie within 500 metres of it, that threshold being the one the data draws rather than a claim about any single address. The nearest postcode sits 13 metres from the water. The median is about 1,070 metres.
Every postcode in the town falls under a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy at the twenty, fifty and hundred year horizons is to hold the line. A policy is an intention to maintain defences over that period. It is not a guarantee, and it is not a defence that already exists.
The nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, recorded sea level rising by about 2.4 millimetres a year across its 1962 to 2015 record. That is a measured historic rate, not a forecast.
Flooding is the weakest thing about Exmouth, and the one risk here that should change what you offer rather than just what you worry about. Check the address, not the town.