Yes, in places, and the places are the whole answer. The town grew up where the River Lemon comes down to the Teign, which was excellent for mills and has been a running argument with water ever since. About one postcode in seven sits in the highest river-and-sea flood zone. The rest of the town sits outside it. This is an address-level question wearing a town-level costume, and the town-level version is close to useless.
Taking the Environment Agency's river-and-sea mapping first, roughly 15% of the area's postcodes fall inside flood zone 3, the highest-probability band, and about 4% fall inside zone 2. Those two are separate bands rather than one inside the other: zone 2 is the additional medium-probability fringe sitting beyond zone 3, which is why it is the smaller figure here. A postcode in zone 3 is not a prediction that a house will flood. It is a statement about the modelled probability of the ground it stands on.
Surface water is a different mechanism and the zone maps say nothing about it. Rain landing on the higher ground around the town has to go somewhere, and it does not consult the river maps on the way down. The combined indicator further down folds it in. Worth knowing alongside it: about 12% of the area's postcodes fall inside a recorded historic flood extent, out of 123 logged events, the most recent dating to the end of December 1979.
Looking forward rather than back, the climate-adjusted zone adds under 1% of postcodes on top of the current mapping. That is the allowance for a wetter century applied to the same modelling, not a separate forecast.
For insurance, the practical consequence is that flood exposure is priced, and it is priced at the address rather than the town. A property inside zone 3, or one with a recorded flood behind it, can attract a higher premium, a higher excess, or questions a lender wants answered. Get an indicative quote before instructing a solicitor rather than after, because the quote is the fastest honest read on how the market views a specific house.
On the combined postcode reading, which takes at least one flood indicator including surface water, about 13% of the area's postcodes rate high, 18% medium and 29% low. These bands overlap with the zone figures above rather than adding to them, so nobody should be stacking the two sets together to build a scarier total.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping puts 3,028 properties inside the risk bands, of which 122 are high, 484 medium and 904 low, with 618 very low. Only postcodes carrying some risk appear in that list at all, so this is a count of the exposed rather than a survey of the town. Of the high band, 11 are residential.
On whether anything stands between the water and the building, about 14% of postcodes sit inside a high-risk extent with no defence present in the modelling, against about 1% where a defence is present. That second figure is a statement about the model, not a promise about the house. A defence in a dataset has overtopped in real weather before.
The water is closer than the market town framing suggests. About 20% of postcodes lie within 500 metres of the coast, the closest point comes within roughly 41 metres, and the median distance runs to about 920 metres. Every postcode here is covered by a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy across 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 defence that already exists, and it is not a guarantee that funding follows.
At the nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, the record from 1962 to 2015 measured sea level rising at about 2.35 millimetres a year. That is what was recorded over those decades rather than a projection of the next ones.
Flood risk here lands in the middle: real, mapped, and unevenly distributed. Buy in the wrong seven per cent and it becomes the defining fact about the house, and the only way to know which side of that line you are on is to check the exact address rather than the town.