This put up is a part of a sequence sponsored by Cotality.
Homeownership has lengthy been synonymous with the American Dream. And it’s no surprise: proudly owning property lets you customise the place you reside, construct stability, and, maybe most significantly, it provides you the chance to construct long-term wealth.
Homeownership, nevertheless, is barely an act of wealth-building for so long as you’ll be able to 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 may be carried out to mitigate their affect. Danger literacy additionally entails 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 owners must safe actually ample property insurance coverage. With out this knowhow, they’re extra prone to accept the minimal protection required by their mortgage corporations, with out understanding different or expanded protections.
Additionally, with threat insights and literacy, policyholders are extra apt to pursue correct residence mitigation measures that fortify their properties towards catastrophe (and probably decrease insurance coverage charges).
That is all crucial to sustainable homeownership, and subsequently, to the establishment of property insurance coverage.
The Greatest Brokers of Danger Literacy
Insurers are properly positioned to provoke proactive home-owner threat training, with underwriters and threat managers having the perfect entry to disaster and hazard information.
Organising your underwriting and threat administration capabilities to be extra collaborative with customer-facing roles is an efficient method to set up a practice of selling threat literacy for policyholders early within the journey of homeownership.
Listed below are three easy steps insurers can take to start out 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 — particularly from superior disaster threat fashions that frequently generate up to date details about completely different hazards and their potential for loss. For instance, the peril-specific and composite threat fashions out there from Cotality™ reveal the threats of flooding from rivers and lakes or present historic information on fires or damaging hail in any specified area. These insights are pertinent for policyholders as they take into account 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 purchasers.
When gross sales groups higher perceive evolving threat, they change into empowered to each promote insurance policies and educate policyholders about potential catastrophes that might affect 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 outfitted to beat objections to greater price, but needed, protection.
To facilitate this data trade and uphold this new normal 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 position 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. Information-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 attainable to ship threat literacy even earlier than potential homebuyers make main property-related choices.
- Lead advertising and marketing efforts with value-added messaging
The best method to educate owners about insurance coverage earlier than they understand they don’t have sufficient is thru threat literacy-driven advertising and marketing content material.
Insurance coverage advertising and marketing groups can flip threat literacy insights from underwriting or threat administration into value-added messaging on completely different channels by means of completely different kinds: web site content material, thought management, electronic mail campaigns, and social media posts.
Social media posts might present the proper discussion board for offering fascinating details about threat, frightening folks to consider their very own threat literacy.
Focused electronic mail campaigns can ship related insights to owners in high-risk areas. The probabilities are infinite for threat literacy advertising and marketing, which invitations partaking conversations about customizing property insurance coverage accordingly.
The sooner policyholders are launched to threat literacy, the much less possible they’re to expertise sticker shock when making insurance coverage choices. When price isn’t the only real focus, clients are higher positioned to thoughtfully assess what protection greatest helps their long-term targets and capability for sustained homeownership.
Such a advertising and marketing content material supply additionally develops buyer belief. When protection is about extra than simply the fee, clients 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 troublesome 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 enhance these professionals’ bandwidth for spreading threat literacy.
Automating underwriting processes that don’t require human thoughtfulness provides professionals extra time to curate threat insights for different enterprise capabilities (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 complicated threat evaluation. With out extra tedious tasks on their shoulders, underwriters have extra capability to speak the not-so-obvious threat findings to buyer going through groups, who can then translate these insights to clients as threat literacy.
UnderwritingCenter™ additionally provides 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 correct assets 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 corporations maximize their alternatives for spreading threat literacy throughout insurance coverage workflows, the mortgage and actual property industries may quickly understand how necessary it’s to introduce threat literacy earlier within the homebuying course of.
By way of threat literacy, insurers can take measured steps to preserving the American Dream of homeownership.
© 2025 Cotality. All rights reserved. Whereas the entire content material and knowledge is believed to be correct, it’s supplied by Cotality “as is” with no assure, illustration, or guarantee, specific or implied, of any type 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 way for the content material or data or merchandise or any reliance thereon. Cotality™, the Cotality brand, Intelligence past bounds™, and UnderwritingCenter™ are the emblems of CoreLogic, Inc. d/b/a Cotality or its associates or subsidiaries.
Subjects
Disaster
Carriers
Householders
