Inside the Roof Age Solution Trusted by Top Insurance Carriers
CAPE’s solution is leveraged by top-20 P&C carriers and utilizes aerial imagery and machine learning-powered change detection to produce an accurate roof age for residential and commercial properties across the U.S.
Roof age, a key factor in modern insurance workflows, has long relied on inaccurate data from sources like agents or homeowners and incomplete data from sources like permits. It is no secret that the accuracy of this data point is critical to a carrier’s business, as it is a mainstay in use cases across underwriting, rating, and coverage decisions.
Inside CAPE Roof Age
CAPE Roof Age derives an accurate and objective age value using historical high-resolution aerial imagery and AI-based change detection. The CAPE model analyzes past and present imagery to identify the point in time when a roof was completely replaced.
CAPE’s imagery-based roof age solution not only provides the roof’s age in years, but it also provides the year of the last full roof replacement, a corresponding confidence score, and access to the related imagery to support agent or customer conversations. Inversely, the model can also verify if a recent roof replacement has not occurred.
Unlike the traditional sources of roof age information, CAPE’s data is both transparent and verifiable. Underwriters can verify the data by easily reviewing the imagery in question and utilizing the provided confidence scores before taking action.
CAPE Roof Age has 95% accuracy, making it an effective and reliable tool for insurers. It can be accessed through API, batch processing, or within the CAPE web application.
CAPE Roof Age Use Cases and Benefits
Renewal Underwriting: Clean up your policies in force (PIF) at one time to ensure appropriate coverage, retain customers, and reduce premium leakage for your existing book of business.
New Business Quoting: Streamline new business at the point of quote by taking the onus off your customers and agents to guess a roof age, allowing carriers to stop defaulting to inaccurate roof age estimates (like the age of the home), and identifying and flagging potential roof age errors or inconsistencies at the point of quote.
New Business Inspection Optimization: More accurately implement underwriting guidelines that route applications to the optimal path by efficiently prioritizing straight-through processing, inspection, or kick-outs based on underwriting guidelines. Insurers can also accurately execute on pre-existing underwriting guidelines that include roof age or add roof age to guidelines to improve underwriting decisions.
Coverage and Endorsement Management: Better manage endorsements, deductible, and coverage levels to accurately apply ACV, cosmetic, or matching endorsements based on roof age and right-size wind/hail or all-peril deductibles.
Rating: Use CAPE Roof Age as a direct rating variable to improve risk segmentation and more accurately price risk at new business and renewal. If a carrier is already using roof age in rating, it can replace existing inaccurate data sources with the objective CAPE data to improve lift and better match rate to risk.
Reinsurance: Use CAPE Roof Age to reduce uncertainty in portfolio-wide risk. Insurers can improve catastrophe model roof age inputs, brokers and carriers can improve reinsurance terms with more accurate roof age data, and reinsurers can confidently assess cedent books by reducing uncertainty.
Accurate Roof Age and Beyond
Leveraging CAPE Roof Age instantly improves the accuracy of this key data point over agent, customer, or permit-derived information and helps support informed portfolio strategies in key risk areas.
An accurate roof age is only the beginning, however. Newer roofs can be in poor condition, and older roofs can be in good condition. Use roof age in tandem with CAPE’s Roof Condition Rating (RCR) to unlock the best segmentation for pricing, coverage decisions, and underwriting.
Ready to quickly improve the accuracy of your roof age data? Reach out to our team here to schedule a roof age test and ROI discussion.