Regional land use patterns influence and are influenced by the climate system in important ways, and the most economically important of these interactions take place in the region’s coastal zone. Changing flood risks threaten the value of billions of dollars worth of coastal real estate as well as the viability of coastal communities. This paper presents an agent-based model to capture some of the main features of the housing market that emerges from interactions between autonomous buyers and sellers. We use this model to investigate the adaptive responses of real estate markets to changing patterns of flooding and flood insurance policies by means of parallel theoretical and empirical efforts. The model includes interactions among households and municipal government through property tax collection and dissemination of flooding risk information. Empirically, we use detailed data from a flood-prone coastal community in Monmouth County, NJ, USA to calibrate our model.