'Doesn't seem fair': Insurance company used satellite imagery to assess Massachusetts woman's home
A lot of people have been going through the roof when they open their homeowners insurance renewals. Increased building costs combined with catastrophic weather events around the world have led to skyrocketing insurance rates.
But that's not the half of it for a Massachusetts woman who could not believe what her insurance company was asking her to do as a condition of being renewed.
In November, Worcester resident Athena Haddon got a letter no homeowner ever wants. It said her homeowners insurance would not be renewed when her policy expired. The issue: her roof.
"I panicked," Haddon said. "They wouldn't budge. That was their determination. There was no appeal process or no negotiating."
In the nonrenewal letter, Haddon's insurance company, Travelers, wrote the "roof shows advanced signs of wear and needs to be replaced." It was the original slate roof on her Worcester triple-decker, but Haddon said she had kept up with routine maintenance and had no leaks.
What really floored her about it all, though, was that no one from Travelers had actually come out to inspect her roof in person. Instead, the company used satellite imagery to assess the property's condition.
"It doesn't seem fair at all that somebody could do this through satellite imaging or through new technology, that they can go around and determine the condition of our roof," Haddon said.
Haddon is not the only one. A Massachusetts customer of a different insurance company, who did not want to appear on camera for this story, said she got a warning to replace her roof or face nonrenewal, and her roof was only 14 years old.
Haddon, worried about her insurance rates if she didn't replace the roof, rushed to get the work done. She received the warning letter in mid-November; it was dated Nov. 6, and her policy expired just a few weeks later on Dec. 26.
"We're in New England, and not many people get their roofs done in the middle of the winter," she said. "Secondly, I knew the cost was going to be close to $30,000, and to come up with that kind of money in a short amount of time was stressful."
It's not just roof condition. Insurance companies can use satellite images to check for a range of issues, from problematic trees to flooding concerns and proximity to the coast. The images are then analyzed by a human underwriter.
But this is all compounded by the fact that insurance companies are simply getting tougher about what they choose to insure, and so they are sending more notices of nonrenewal.
"I've had four [nonrenewals] so far this year. I've never had that until this year," Marcy Neumeyer, director of sales at Barrows Insurance Agency in Mansfield, said.
Neumeyer said insurance companies that have faced catastrophic losses from climate or weather events, even if they're elsewhere across the country, are getting pickier about their business.
"They want perfect, vanilla business," Neumeyer said. "So if they think anything isn't going to align [with that], they're getting it off their books."
Neumeyer said people should not panic if they get a notice of nonrenewal in the mail. Instead, she said it should be used as an opportunity to shop around and consider calling a local insurance agency, which can compare multiple companies.
"Definitely shop around," she said. "Just because one carrier says no doesn't mean another one will."
Travelers did not offer a comment on the record for this story.