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Homeowner Report
The Real Cost to Re-Build your Home in the event of an insurance claim.
As property owners, my husband and I wanted to know the real cost to re-build our investment properties in the event of an insurance claim. The InspekTech Homeowner Report demonstrated we were underinsured on replacement value by a significant amount. InspekTech's knowledge of the latest building codes and contractor costs gave us a realistic expectation of current costs. By utilizing the InspekTech reports to determine true replacement values, we are assured of having the full cost to replace or repair damage on our rental properties in the event of a claim. – Trish & Henri L
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It’s estimated that approximately 60% of existing homeowner policies in Canada are underinsured*. This means over ½ of homeowners are at financial risk of not being able to have their homes replaced to existing cost in the event of a claim (referred to as “Replacement Cost”). Put another way, the difference of what you’re currently insured for – and what it would cost to actually replace your existing home – could be a large dollar difference.
InspekTech® appraises homes primarily throughout British Columbia each year for insurance companies of excellence and their underwriting departments who are concerned they are insuring to the correct value of a homes replacement cost. We often discover that a significant number of these homes are underinsured and some replacement costs are off by tens of thousands of dollars and some by even hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, when we come to review replacement cost for insurance underwriting purposes for our corporate clients, our internal audits show a range of homeowner underinsurance between $75,000 to $400,000 of which approximately 65% of the increases fall somewhere within a range of $120,000 to $200,000 (when a baseline site-visit appraisal has been prior conducted by InspekTech®, usually our insurance company clients catch this adjustment at "review time", or have us do a "value recalculation update" for them to make sure they do).
In a nutshell, "Selecting a lower level of coverage may save you a few dollars on the policy itself. However, if you’re underinsured, you may not receive the full cost to replace or repair the damages, which may result in out-of-pocket costs. Since insurance companies are only required to pay up to the amount you’re covered for, you can’t claim for more than the coverage you have" (quote from Aviva Canada website).
This can be easily avoided by having InspekTech® provide you a proper replacement value on your home.
* Source logic (2024): We took the CoreLogic Residential Handbook 2020-21 for the USA states 60% underinsurance and Opta Information Intelligence 2015 states Canadian underinsurance at 65%. We took the lower of the US and Canada % stats to arrive at a reasonable underinsurance estimate for Canada; therefore this underinsurance estimate could be slightly lower, or higher.
InspekTech® can determine how much it would cost to replace your home in the event of an insurance claim.
Step 1: Following provision and acceptance of our quote (see below), InspekTech® will schedule a convenient time to visit your home (our "Field Work"). An InspekTech® Field Inspector will arrive, do some measurements and take photos of the exterior and interior, while collecting important internal and external component information about the dwelling. Depending on house size and complixity, this work takes approximately 1-2 hours.
Step 2: Next, we compile our Field Work and move to our "Office" stage. At this point an Insurance to Value (ITV) analyst takes the Field Work and melds it to updated detailed financial replacement cost data that we utilize from CoreLogic®. These steps, and a few more in between, dovetail into the development of an InspekTech® Certified report deliverable.
Step 3: You're provided a detailed InspekTech® report(s), typically 15-20 pages in length, that's easy-to-read stating in BOLD the real cost to rebuild your home in the event of an insurance claim.
Step 4: You can provide the report, should you wish, to any insurance provider(s) who will then be equipped to properly underwrite or price your home insurance to an accurate insurance sq.ft. claims value (i.e. replacement cost).
( Step 5: Relax. )
Receive a No Obligation quote on the "real cost to rebuild your home in the event of an insurance claim".
Please email us this info:
What is the size of your home (approx. sq.ft)?
What's the physical address of your home?
Are there any "outbuildings" on the property (i.e. secondary homes, cottages, structures with suites, etc)? If yes, please provide approx. sq ft.
Upon receiving your email, we'll provide you an InspekTech® price.
We serve all of BC and parts of Alberta.
Note: An internal audit sampling in June 2021 of over 300 delivered InspekTech ITV Capture™ reports for the first half of 2021 resulted in Replacement Value (RV) known reporting errors at InspekTech® to be 0.28% per 100. InspekTech’s approximate ¼ of 1% per 100 error ratio has been our representative RV known error range for at least the past 5 years (this is well below the 5% error range considered normal by AIC, the Appraisal Institute of Canada).