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Raising the roof age standard in 2024

May 2024
David Tobias
Over the past year, the Betterview Roof Age model has continued to evolve through continuous customer feedback, further enhancing its accuracy and utility for numerous insurers
May 2024
David Tobias
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When Betterview launched the Roof Age solution in April 2023—the first of its kind—it sparked a new wave of insurtech product innovation and risk management in P&C insurance. By harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision to interpret high-resolution, historical aerial imagery, we empowered insurers to determine roof age with remarkable precision. This marked a departure from traditional methods fraught with inaccuracies, such as relying on property records, homeowner estimates, and permit data, which has led to substantial premium leakages for insurers. Over the past year, the Betterview Roof Age model has continued to evolve through continuous customer feedback, further enhancing its accuracy and utility for numerous insurers.  

AI-Powered Roof Age & Superior Aerial Imagery

The acquisition of Betterview by Nearmap in December 2023 signaled even better fortunes for the Roof Age solution. To name a few: 
  1. This combination constitutes a proprietary full tech stack from camera systems, to imagery capture and processing, to property intelligence insights.  
  2. Nearmap provides a permanent imagery source as the backbone for both the Betterview Property Intelligence Platform and the Roof Age solution.  
  3. The Betterview Platform and Roof Age solution perform best with Nearmap imagery, known for its high resolution and clarity. The Roof Age model is trained and developed on the Nearmap imagery to ensure accuracy and consistency. 
  4. Nearmap imagery covers 87% of the U.S. population up to three times per year, giving insurers the most relevant imagery, consistently at sub-3” GSD. This unique frequency at high resolution is the foundation of a great AI-powered Roof Age solution. 
With high-resolution, consistent, frequent, and permanent imagery from Nearmap, the Betterview Platform offers insurers an even more reliable Roof Age solution. No other property intelligence providers match these capabilities. 
This synergy harnesses the power of historical imagery analysis and AI technology, enabling our Roof Age model to pinpoint precise moments of roofing material and shape changes. With such detailed, consistent, and up-to-date imagery, insurers can rely on our Roof Age solution to streamline their underwriting and quoting processes significantly. Moreover, by validating our Roof Age model with permit data, we further enhance the accuracy of the roof age result.  

Enhanced Product Benefits

The Betterview Roof Age solution offers insurers several compelling benefits:  
  • Quoting: Streamline the quoting process by pre-filling roof age, providing instant and accurate quotes.  
  • Risk Selection: Choose better risks, prevent avoidable losses, and quicken the quote-to-bind process.  
  • Pricing & Policy Terms: Refine rating algorithms to accurately price policies, minimizing premium leakage or offering more competitive pricing. Determine policy terms such as ACV vs. RCV and establish the roof payment schedule.  
  • Inspection Optimization: Prioritize physical inspections for properties with older roofs to better manage and mitigate overall risk.  
Our Roof Age solution’s ability to offer accurate, instant quotes streamlines customer acquisition while elevating the customer experience and operational efficiency. Accurate roof age enables insurers to conduct targeted outreach, fostering proactive property maintenance, and improving risk mitigation strategies. Risk selection becomes more strategic, and the quote-to-bind process is accelerated, allowing insurers to secure optimal risks and improve their bottom line.  
Furthermore, combining Roof Age and the Betterview Platform’s property insights such as roof condition, roof materials, and peril scores, enables insurers to finetune their pricing algorithms, determining policy terms that align with the actual risk presented by each property.  
Finally, the tool allows insurers to prioritize their resources more effectively, optimizing the scheduling and deployment of physical inspections. This intelligent allocation of resources ensures that insurers can proactively manage their risk, mitigating the impact of potential future claims and safeguarding their portfolio.

A Future Shaped by Precision and Proactivity

By prioritizing accuracy and leveraging the latest technology, Nearmap not only enables insurers to manage risks more effectively—we’re paving the way for a more resilient insurance industry. Our Roof Age solution raises the standard in property intelligence, empowering insurers to protect properties and their occupants with unparalleled precision while achieving operational excellence. This is the future of insurance shaped by aerial imagery and data, defined by accuracy, and driven by innovative technology.  
This is why the Betterview Roof Age solution has been used and trusted by insurance carriers since its launch last year. Learn more about Roof Age and test our Roof Age model with your data to see the accuracy and dependability for yourself.