If you’ve ever applied for home insurance, you’ve probably felt like you were being quizzed on how well you know your home. You may have even encountered questions you weren’t sure how to answer, like “How is your roof attached to your walls?” And if you’re like us, you may have wondered why it has to be that way.
Spoiler: it doesn’t.
Though those answers are important, your input isn’t the only way to get them. It’s often more accurate when homeowners aren’t tasked with providing that information.
We still use the data any insurer needs to determine your risk, coverage, and premium, but we use more than 10,000 data points and scientific validation to reduce the number of questions you have to answer.
In fact, one of the key results from a third-party competitor analysis revealed how few property detail questions we ask compared to other insurtechs, like Lemonade, Hippo, Branch, and Gabi.
And just like that, insurance gets so much easier!
Using property data to simplify home insurance
Consumers expect a user-friendly digital experience, even with insurance. In a 2019 study, 53% of participants said that they shopped online for homeowners insurance and 61% said that they are likely to shop online for home insurance in the future. But, as an Accenture report noted, most online insurance experiences are still lacking. Nearly 75% of shoppers ran into problems when buying coverage online. Almost a quarter of respondents said the process was too complicated while another 22% complained it took too long.
Home insurance applications don’t have to be so long and confusing. Much of the information that other insurance companies collect manually can be sourced in other ways, so we developed technology to gather and evaluate it. Basically, we take the complexity out of homeowners insurance.
In addition to speeding up and simplifying the buying process, our use of objective external data also increases underwriting and pricing accuracy. While most folks are experts on what makes their house a home – its nooks and crannies, the floorboard that creaks – most would have to guess about the shape of their roof.
Where we get property data and how we use it
Unlike many of our competitors who rely on the homeowner or only pull data from one source, we work with dozens of vendors and pull data from public records and real estate listings to ingest thousands of attributes, such as the home’s:
- Construction.
- Roof type, age, and material.
- Square footage and the number of stories.
- Build date.
- Number of bathrooms.
- Basement type.
- Finish quality.
- Foundation type.
- The number of stories.
- And much more.
We also leverage geospatial data, which helps us understand exposure to catastrophic risk and respond to disasters.
To help us use all the information we gather, we built a few tools that automate, predict, and analyze it for greater accuracy and efficiency:
- Maestro is a digital platform that collects, prioritizes, and generates millions of data points from external and internal data sources. It’s the technology we use to prefill data when you apply for a quote from Kin.
- Kinfidence is the name of our artificial intelligence (AI) that uses the data from Maestro to score our level of confidence in certain data points in near real-time. This helps us speed up the process for customers with significantly less data input.
- Kin Bot automates repetitive tasks, like reviewing and validating documents to support the data we collect.
If for any reason we can’t verify your data with our technology, we bring in our amazing (and human!) Kin team to validate it and further train our models.
We only use our data and AI to the extent that it reduces bias, increases objectivity, and offers more accurate information about the home. We have never used (and have no plans to use) any biometric data.
How data prefill eliminates extra home insurance questions
Much of the data we collect with these tools answers questions we use to determine your home insurance coverage and premium. We’re almost always able to prefill (and not have to ask you about) property details like:
- Square footage
- Number of bathrooms
- Roof shape
- Overall quality
- Number of stories
- Foundation type
- Year built
- Roof material
- Foundation shape
- Exterior wall finish
Discover smarter insurance
The best way to test our tech? Give it a try! Getting a home insurance quote is an easy way to see our data wizardry in action. Who knows – maybe you’ll save some time and money along the way.
