View this article online: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/08/09/497617.htm

New Betterview Roof Report Determines Condition, Characteristics

Drone inspection company Betterview has released Property Profile – a new way to get a deep understanding of the characteristics and risks of a property and its roof.

Betterview’s Property Profile uses satellite & aerial imagery, along with a growing number of other data attributes like historical weather, to determine the condition and characteristics of a roof and the risk of future insurance claims. Betterview’s risk scoring is based on proprietary data and algorithms that Betterview has developed through its property inspection experience and customer feedback.

Insurance companies are using Property Profile throughout the property insurance lifecycle, including:

• Quoting: Speed up and improve the accuracy of policy application data for more accurate quotes that convert at a higher rate.
• Underwriting & Loss-Control: Quickly assess new business and renewals to identify roof problems, as well as determine when and where to send inspectors to improve the customer and agent experience while reducing costs.
• Claims: Investigate property claims before sending an adjuster onsite by identifying pre-existing roof damage via Betterview’s multi-source historical image archive.
• Catastrophe Modeling: Increase modeling accuracy by factoring in secondary roof characteristics along with assessor’s data.
• Catastrophe Response: Analyze a portfolio post-catastrophe to quickly identify which policies are “full”, “partial”, and “no loss”

Dave Tobias, Co-Founder, Betterview, said the new service came as demand for its drone inspections and reporting increased and customers started requesting help with triaging their drone inspections.

“When we created Property Profile, its original use case was to help our users to identify policies that should be inspected by a drone. After testing it with our customers, we started hearing about the value it could deliver throughout an organization. With this feedback we enhanced Property Profile by returning additional data sources, allowing for personal & commercial lines insurers to incorporate this information into their front-end and back-end workflows.”

Customers can access Betterview’s Property Profile roof scores and characteristics via API or through Betterview’s platform by typing in an address or uploading an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file. Additional data points available with each Property Profile include property characteristics, historical weather, natural hazard risk, historical imagery, and more.

Some of the characteristics that Betterview’s computer vision technology can automatically detect include:

• Roof Shape
• Roof Material
• Roof Damage
• Tree Overhang
• Ponding
• Rust

Betterview developed Property Profile in response to feedback from customers who wanted information about buildings and properties faster and cheaper. While decreasing costs have improved ROI for drone inspections, insurers are still limiting their drone usage to high ROI use cases. As a result, Betterview figured out how to answer most of the questions its customers were asking using pre-captured aerial & satellite imagery, along with other data sources like historical weather.

In addition, to the release of its new Property Profile report, Betterview has launched a new website, which features an ROI calculator for Betterview services, new industry solutions page and more.