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Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

wsj.com

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Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#6
post #4

If insurance is individually priced to this degree, what's the point of insurance?

Why would insurance being individually priced negate its value? The benefit of insurance is the pooling of the risk. The more individually it is priced, the more efficiently it works. (Not that I'm a fan of insurers spying on their customers from the sky...)

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#7
Undeclared trampolines? What kind of insurance is this?

I don't remember my house insurance (or medical, or any other kind really) being this detailed. I just picked rough estimates for the value of my structure and the items inside, and that was about it? There might have also been a waiver about not doing any hazardous activities like open fires or storing chemicals on the property.

It definitely wasn't this detailed.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#8
post #4

If insurance is individually priced to this degree, what's the point of insurance?

If you can afford to rebuild your house after a fire, there will be no point (and there never was a point).

Insurance has always been a negative-EV trade for the average person, but there have been mispricings that make it positive-EV when you have more information than the insurance company. However, the inefficiency meant that you also had to pay for the uncertainty on their estimate of your risk.

With less uncertainty, the spread in the market should go down, and your premium should converge to something close to your actual risk plus the cost to assess your risk.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#9
post #4

If insurance is individually priced to this degree, what's the point of insurance?

Higher liability means they need to extract more money from you. That's the point of insurance. See: wildfires in California and flooding in Florida causing insurers to pull out. Once the insurance companies lose money, the risk is too high...

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#10

Undeclared trampolines? What kind of insurance is this? I don't remember my house insurance (or medical, or any other kind really) being this detailed. I just picked rough estimates for the value of my structure and the items inside, and that was about it? There might have also been a waiver about not doing any hazardous activities like open fires or storing chemicals on the property. It definitely wasn't this detail…

I was asked about a trampoline with two major carriers. I believe they would have been satisfied to know it was netted, similarly to how they want pools fenced.
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