Before the next hurricane season sweeps the U.S., it’s a great time for property risk managers to batten down the hatches on an important but sometimes overlooked method of reducing risk — getting an accurate on-site property insurance valuation.
An accurate property valuation offers serious benefits to help you reduce your organization’s risk and recoup your investment, should misfortune strike. Some of the more major benefits include:
You improve your ratings with your reinsurer/insurer and avoid “worst case” risk scenarios.
A complete property insurance appraisal, that follows the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) means that you get all the data your insurer/reinsurer needs to determine the most accurate insurance ratings for your property. Because the data is complete, they don’t have to mitigate their own risk by assuming any “worst case” scenarios about your property features. All the data is there to accurately inform their ratings.
You help increase reinsurer/insurer confidence in the quality of your data.
Data from a thorough, accurate property appraisal helps insurers and reinsurers gain confidence in your organization and that, in turn, builds a framework for better insurance ratings.
You can feel secure knowing that you have the right coverage at the right rate.
The more precise your property valuation data is, the more you can rest assured you aren’t overpaying for too much insurance or paying too little and missing the coverage you need when problems occur.
You have a benchmark that substantiates proof of loss.
Having solid property valuation data on hand becomes invaluable when you’re contacting your reinsurer/insurer about damage to your property. There’s no need to scour your files, scramble for the information or question the validity or origin of past data. You already have all the right information available.
You secure better, more accurate rates.
By collecting detailed ISO classification details and COPE and catastrophe modeling data, you gain a more complete picture of your risk profile which, when run through modeling programs, can result in more favorable rates.
You may discover property you weren’t accounting for.
Our appraisers have seen this happen many times, where we’ve been slated to value a certain number of buildings and then we discover the client’s outdated SOV doesn’t include properties that either were added after the last valuation or simply were missed altogether. If the property isn’t listed on the SOV, it isn’t getting covered, leaving the organization dangerously open to risk. A new valuation can help you make sure you account for any changes in your properties over time and wrangle that errant property data.
You may find you were paying for buildings that no longer exist.
This is another issue that happens fairly often; our Centurisk valuation specialists go to appraise a property only to discover that property was sold years ago but it was never removed from a customer’s statement of values. This means the client has been paying insurance on a property they no longer own. A current property valuation helps remove those phantom properties from the schedule and right-sizes premiums, positively affecting the bottom line.
You no longer need to rely on institutional knowledge about certain properties; you have confirmed data.
Lots of organizations tend to have the structural history of various properties housed in the memories of a few dependable, long-time employees. A property appraisal helps confirm the true information about a property and document it, so those individuals aren’t the only source of important historic institutional knowledge.
A property appraisal supports more accurate annual trending.
A fresh, thorough property appraisal gives you a solid basis for more accurate annual trending. This can be handy for those times when new valuations just aren’t in the budget or logistics make arranging a new valuation a challenge.
Better accuracy for today and tomorrow
So, as you can see, there are diverse benefits to getting a current property insurance valuation. It gives you confidence to know you have the right coverage at the right rating. It supports better, more streamlined processes with your reinsurer/insurer. And it forms an important basis for more accurate trending for years to come.
To learn more about Centurisk’s property insurance valuation services, click here. Or contact us for more information here. We’d be glad to help.