Personal Insurance Blog

When writing insurance policies and homeowner policies in particular, agents are now required to obtain much more detailed information than in the past.

Previously, agents have been expected to gather details about the home, such as year of construction, type of construction, style of home, and updates to the structure and internal systems. This information helps insurance to get a sense of the risk involved with writing a policy for the home.

While it is still very valuable to insurance agents to know the characteristics of a home before insuring it, especially involving any previous damage it might have incurred, they also must consider human factors when developing your insurance policy.

Claims history is a very useful tool for agents to understand your history as an insurance customer. Although this does not provide any more information about the structural soundness of the home to be insured, it helps to develop a risk profile of a customer, and how likely they are to place a claim in the future. In the case of home insurance, claims history will be provided for both the insured customer as well as the home itself, so if the home in question has recently been purchased, claims filed by a previous owner will be included in the history.

Insurance scores are a numerical value determined by certain characteristics of a customer. In many ways, they are comparable to the financial credit scores involved with money lending. However, insurance scores predict the risk associated with a customer, instead of credit, and the values of the two are not necessarily related to one another.

At this point in time, Massachusetts only requires insurance scores on homeowner policies whereas other states require this on auto policies as well.

If you have any questions about how these changes may affect you personally, please contact us and we will try to help you. Learn about your home insurance options here.