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Homeowner Report
The Real Cost to Re-Build your Home in the event of an insurance claim.
On-site pre-claim insurance appraisals for the General Public, with exterior & interior image capture, including Replacement costing, delivered via a high-quality and easy to read report.
Is your home Underinsured?
A Brief Overview that could save you a lot of grief and money
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 avoided, easily...
* Source: CoreLogic Residential Handbook 2020-21 for the USA states 60% underinsurance and Opta Information Intelligence 2015 stated 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.
Solution
InspekTech® can determine how much it would cost to replace your home in the event of an insurance claim.
Step 1: InspekTech® will schedule a convenient time with you 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. )
Price
Your Pricing is based on:
Your price is based on your Home size and location (and is serviced under our ITV Capture™ report system).
Your price, only as necessary, will include any outbuildings (i.e. secondary homes on property, cottages, outbuildings with suites, etc). The rate for the Total Outbuilding Report (TOR™) is typically less than the ITV Capture™ report.
Your "Real cost to rebuild your home in the event of an insurance claim" Quote:
Please email us info from the above points 1 & 2. Then, and we'll promptly provide you an InspekTech® price.
Kindly include your name and the full address of your home(s) with your email.
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 ½ 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 the Appraisal Institute of Canada). While we expect these metrics to be materially unchanged, this audit data is scheduled to be updated in 2024.