Homeownership has lengthy been synonymous with the American Dream. And it’s no marvel: proudly owning property lets you customise the place you reside, construct stability, and, maybe most significantly, it offers you the chance to construct long-term wealth.
Homeownership, nonetheless, is barely an act of wealth-building for so long as you possibly can afford to guard your property in any state of affairs. In any other case, the funding is a raffle.
Sustainable homeownership requires threat literacy — deep information of disaster dangers, the various threats disasters pose to properties, and what could be carried out to mitigate their impression. Danger literacy additionally includes an understanding of how insurance coverage works, disaster threat protection choices, and the monetary impacts and safety limitations of various insurance policies.
Danger literacy is the information foundation householders have to safe actually satisfactory property insurance coverage. With out this knowhow, they’re extra prone to accept the minimal protection required by their mortgage firms, with out understanding various or expanded protections.
Additionally, with threat insights and literacy, policyholders are extra apt to pursue correct house mitigation measures that fortify their properties in opposition to catastrophe (and probably decrease insurance coverage charges).
That is all essential to sustainable homeownership, and due to this fact, to the establishment of property insurance coverage.
The Greatest Brokers of Danger Literacy
Insurers are effectively positioned to provoke proactive house owner threat training, with underwriters and threat managers having the perfect entry to disaster and hazard knowledge.
Establishing your underwriting and threat administration features to be extra collaborative with customer-facing roles is an efficient technique to set up a practice of selling threat literacy for policyholders early within the journey of homeownership.
Listed here are three easy steps insurers can take to begin selling threat literacy, with out overhauling operations.
- Construct communication channels between underwriting/hazard threat professionals and customer-facing groups
Spreading threat literacy begins with the insights you have already got — specifically from superior disaster threat fashions that regularly generate up to date details about totally different hazards and their potential for loss. For instance, the peril-specific and composite threat fashions obtainable from Cotality™ reveal the threats of flooding from rivers and lakes or present historic knowledge on fires or damaging hail in any specified area. These insights are pertinent for policyholders as they contemplate the worth of upper priced, but extra complete insurance policies.
Underwriters and threat managers can share the deeper experience they glean with customer-facing groups, streamlining insights so salespeople can successfully talk threat data to shoppers.
When gross sales groups higher perceive evolving threat, they change into empowered to each promote insurance policies and educate policyholders about potential catastrophes that would impression their properties — in addition to alternative ways to personalize their property insurance coverage protection accordingly.
With tailor-made threat literacy, insurance coverage sellers and brokers are extra geared up to beat objections to increased value, but mandatory, protection.
To facilitate this data alternate and uphold this new customary of communication, insurers can implement digital instruments that make cross-functional collaboration fast and handy.
Cotality’s industry-leading loss management administration system, UnderwritingCenter™, performs a key function in spreading threat literacy. This underwriting workflow automation system condenses property and threat insights into streamlined experiences, making it simpler to make these threat insights extra absorbable for customer-facing groups.
There’s a bonus to this set-up, too. Knowledge-driven collaboration can in the end lengthen to networking with mortgage lenders. In sharing insights with lenders, insurers can get earlier entry to future policyholders, making it potential to ship threat literacy even earlier than potential homebuyers make main property-related choices.
- Lead advertising efforts with value-added messaging
The simplest technique to educate householders about insurance coverage earlier than they understand they don’t have sufficient is thru threat literacy-driven advertising content material.
Insurance coverage advertising groups can flip threat literacy insights from underwriting or threat administration into value-added messaging on totally different channels by means of totally different kinds: web site content material, thought management, electronic mail campaigns, and social media posts.
Social media posts might present the right discussion board for offering attention-grabbing details about threat, frightening folks to consider their very own threat literacy.
Focused electronic mail campaigns can ship related insights to householders in high-risk areas. The probabilities are countless for threat literacy advertising, which invitations partaking conversations about customizing property insurance coverage accordingly.
The sooner policyholders are launched to threat literacy, the much less doubtless they’re to expertise sticker shock when making insurance coverage choices. When value just isn’t the only focus, prospects are higher positioned to thoughtfully assess what protection finest helps their long-term objectives and capability for sustained homeownership.
This kind of advertising content material supply additionally develops buyer belief. When protection is about extra than simply the fee, prospects will probably be extra happy and usually tend to stay policyholders.
- Automate underwriting processes in order that threat literacy doesn’t take a again seat
It’s tough to ask threat professionals to speak extra with different departments except extra administrative duties are taken off their plates. Thus, applied sciences that automate underwriting and claims workflows improve these professionals’ bandwidth for spreading threat literacy.
Automating underwriting processes that don’t require human thoughtfulness offers professionals extra time to curate threat insights for different enterprise features (see first level above).
Cotality’s UnderwritingCenter™ automates underwriting workflows by means of rule-based decision-making, figuring out property threat attributes in order that people can concentrate on extra advanced threat evaluation. With out extra tedious initiatives on their shoulders, underwriters have extra capability to speak the not-so-obvious threat findings to buyer dealing with groups, who can then translate these insights to prospects as threat literacy.
UnderwritingCenter™ additionally offers time again to underwriters by enabling digital inspections. By minimizing time spent on job websites, it preserves brainpower for extra strategic, artistic communication.
Increasing the insurance coverage mission to incorporate threat literacy
With the best sources and strategic recreation plan, insurers can change into dependable brokers of threat literacy. Danger information is energy, and is a should for constructing extra resilient, insurable communities in all places.
The precedent set by insurers can have each huge and long-lasting advantages. As soon as insurance coverage firms maximize their alternatives for spreading threat literacy throughout insurance coverage workflows, the mortgage and actual property industries may quickly understand how vital it’s to introduce threat literacy earlier within the homebuying course of.
Via threat literacy, insurers can take measured steps to preserving the American Dream of homeownership.
© 2025 Cotality. All rights reserved. Whereas all the content material and data is believed to be correct, it’s supplied by Cotality “as is” with no assure, illustration, or guarantee, categorical or implied, of any sort together with however not restricted to as to the merchantability, non-infringement of mental property rights, completeness, accuracy, applicability, or health, in reference to the content material or data or merchandise and Cotality assumes no duty or legal responsibility in any respect for the content material or data or merchandise or any reliance thereon. Cotality™, the Cotality emblem, Intelligence past bounds™, and UnderwritingCenter™ are the emblems of CoreLogic, Inc. d/b/a Cotality or its associates or subsidiaries.
