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Home insurance is becoming more expensive and difficult to purchase nationwide, and now homeowners have a new concern: drone flights. As the cost of providing coverage continues to rise, insurers are taking more steps to limit their potential losses. One of those steps is using drones to inspect policyholders’ properties. This is leading to a rash of homeowners receiving cancellation notices due to drone footage.
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Imagine being a homeowner who has dutifully paid your premiums for decades and never filed a claim. You might think this would make you the perfect policyholder. Then one day, you go to the mailbox and find a cancellation notice from your home insurance company. What is more shocking than the cancellation itself is the grainy photo of your roof taken by a drone being cited as the reason for the cancellation.
This recently happened to Daytona Beach, Florida resident Mike Arman. He told the New York Post his policy was canceled after his insurance company flew a drone over his house and took photos that caused them to claim his roof looked “deteriorated.” At least, that’s the explanation Arman’s insurance broker gave him, but Arman is still frustrated by the experience for several reasons.
First, Mike had been a policyholder in good standing for over 50 years. Second, he felt that the photo the drone took of his roof, which motivated the cancellation, was of low quality. He told the New York Post that the picture itself looked like it had been taken from a significant distance by a “far-off satellite.” However, the real kicker for Mike Arman is that his roof was only six years old.
In most cases, the life span of roofs like the one Arman had installed on his home is between 20-30 years. Naturally, he figured there must have been some mistake, so he contacted his insurer and asked them to send someone out to evaluate his roof in person. After the insurance company told him they “didn’t do house calls,” Arman sent his insurance company documentation proving his roof’s relatively young age.
Unfortunately for Arman, none of that mattered to his insurer, who carried through with their cancellation a few months later. The cancellation came at just about the most inopportune moment possible. Florida has been suffering through a full-scale insurance crisis, characterized by major insurers leaving the state and the remaining insurers raising premium prices at a near-geometric rate.
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It has left millions of Florida homeowners like Arman with no viable insurance option besides the state-sponsored Citizens Insurance Company. This time, Arman figured he would be proactive and hire an inspector to certify his roof. Despite receiving approval from his home inspector, Arman got another nasty surprise in the mail as soon as his Citizens policy came up for renewal.
It turns out Citizens uses drones to inspect homes too, and after a flyover at his home, they decided to increase his premiums by 25%. To insurance companies and their shareholders, this policy of inspecting homes via drone seems like good business. Drone technology allows them to “visit” more homes than they ever could in person, and with the increased cost of covering claims, proactively cutting risk allows them to continue functioning.
On the other hand, homeowners like Arman feel like their insurers are “spying” on them and that the cancellation process lacks any real transparency. Mark Friedlander of the Insurance Information Institute (an industry-funded think tank) disagrees. He told Realtor.com that aerial photography “is a much less intrusive way to inspect your home than sending an individual to your property,” and he also believes it is more accurate.
Friedlander concludes that drones can sometimes make mistakes, but he says (without citing any data to back his conclusions up) that aerial surveillance is “10-20 times more accurate” than inspections done by human eyes. On the other hand, homeowners are shocked to find out that cancellations via aerial surveillance photos are even legal.
Albert Fox Cahn, who founded the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told the New York Post that “There’s a need for updated insurance regulations. State law hasn’t caught up with the technology.” In the meantime, he recommends homeowners get proactive about removing potential hazards from their yards in preparation for drone surveillance. He said, “Don’t wait until you get a letter saying that your policy won’t be renewed.”
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This article Could You Be The Next Homeowner To Get Their Policy Dropped Due To Drone Surveillance? originally appeared on Benzinga.com
