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ATTOM’s Building Permit Data: Why It’s the Leading Choice for One Home Insurance Provider

As a home insurance provider, we recently partnered with ATTOM to provide us with building permit data on our policyholders’ properties. This data has been key in helping us to accurately assess risk when it comes to underwriting. In this post, we walk through the unique benefits this data has provided us in this regard and why we chose ATTOM above the other leading building permit data providers.

Improving Home Insurance Underwriting with Residential Building Permit Data

Building permit data has always been a part of our underwriting process. Offering key historic and real-time insights into properties, building permit data has always been a core component in our risk analysis during the underwriting process.

ATTOM’s building permit data offers us a range of important details on property amendments and renovations, from the classification of a job (from work on the foundations of a property to solar panel installations) to the status of a permit. Details on any work undertaken on a property is important for accurately assessing its risk.

In addition, this data has been important in helping us assess what changes have been made to a property and how this impacts its insurability or any claim pay-outs. Often, policyholders forget to inform us of any renovations or amendments planned for their property. As such, having access to reliable, real-time data on properties has helped us ensure we have the data we need on each property we insure.

Notably, since the COVID outbreak occurred, we have also seen some key differences in the risk profiles of the properties we insure. Recently, there has been a sharp rise in the number of homeowners applying for pool permit applications in order to add pools to their property while spending lockdown at home.

Interestingly, requests for pool permits have increased by as much as 30% in some areas of the U.S. – including many of the areas we provide insurance for. As such, we’ve used this data to ensure our policyholders are correctly insured by their current coverage and contacted those who need to increase their premiums.

Why ATTOM is Our Data Provider

When looking for a new data provider, we were concerned with two things:

  1. Who could offer us the most comprehensive building permit data?
  2. Who could provide us with the best customer support for our team?

First and foremost, ATTOM’s nationwide building permit data is one of the most comprehensive on the market. As a home insurer providing insurance to policyholders across the United States, it was vital that we had access to all the data we needed on residential properties. ATTOM provides more than 200 million building permits, gathered from over 2,000 building departments across the U.S. – currently providing the most complete building permit data on the market.

Moreover, as well as offering historic insights into every property, this data is also updated monthly – ensuring we can trust in its accuracy when undertaking any underwriting procedures. As such, the thorough building permit data they provide put ATTOM close to the top of the list for our team.

However, we were also looking for a provider who could offer us excellent customer service. In the past, we worked with a provider who offered us good support in the early stages – but didn’t put much emphasis on working collaboratively with our team in the long-term. Beyond offering the most extensive building permit data to customers, ATTOM’s main focus is on customer service and collaboration. ATTOM have worked side-by-side with us, offering us guidance and advice on how to best utilize their data for our purposes.

Additionally, ATTOM also provide us with a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) delivery solution, which is unlike any other delivery solution we have used in the past. This is a great fit for the technology we already use and allows us to quickly and easily incorporate building permit data into our underwriting processes.

ATTOM Data Solutions: Great Customer Service and The Most Comprehensive Building Permit Data

Both the comprehensiveness of their data and their first-rate collaborative customer support have set ATTOM apart as the right building permit data provider for us. Beyond being able to access reliable, thorough building permit data on our policyholders’ properties, ATTOM has also consistently been there to provide us with support and guidance.

To find out more about how ATTOM can do the same for your insurance company, contact us here. 

The above article is a theoretical use case.

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