Ground Truth
A blog by Nearmap
From imagery to insights to answers. Explore the latest posts and new perspectives emerging in the world of location intelligence.
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How property intelligence improves insurance profitability
improves profitability How property intelligence improves insurance profitability Apr 2026 Apr 2026 Every year, carriers make thousands of pricing, renewal, and claims decisions based on property data that doesn’t reflect the property in front of them. The roof has changed, risk has shifted, but the data hasn’t kept up. That gap, between what the data says and what’s actually there is a profitability problem. How fragmented property data drives premium leakage and rising LAE Mispriced risk is the most obvious result, but it’s not the only one. When carriers are working from disconnected or outdated property intelligence , the cost compounds across your organization. During underwriting, premium leakage shows up at both ends of the book. At new business, policies are priced on conditions that may be months or years out of date: a property comes in with solar panels installed, a new outbuilding, or a roof already showing wear, none of it visible in the data the underwriter is working from. At renewal, properties that have deteriorated or expanded are renewed at rates that don’t reflect current risk. At claims, it shows up in loss adjustment expense (LAE). When the underwriting data and claims data come from different sources, teams spend time reconciling instead of deciding. Indemnity disputes take longer and adjusters go to properties that could have been triaged remotely. What connected property intelligence delivers for P&C loss ratios The below commercial property tells the story. Aftermath of LA fires On January 27, 2020, its Roof Spotlight™ Index sat at 54, well into the danger zone. Had an underwriter been monitoring it on the Betterview application , they would have had three clear paths forward: cancel the policy, schedule a roof inspection, or adjust the premium, before the policy renewal date. None of that happened. A claim was paid out and the roof replaced between May and November 2020. A loss of approximately $900,000 that could have been avoided. From flagging property changes and tracking deterioration over time, to triggering peril and weather alerts and acting through cancellation, inspections, and premium adjustment - the full workflow runs in one place: Betterview ™ . Thinking beyond claims Those same pre-event insights don’t just improve day-to-day claims decisions — they become critical in catastrophe response. Vulnerability scores based on pre-event imagery enable claims teams to proactively prepare resources, predict losses and reserves, and communicate with policyholders, even before damage happens. Immediately after a major weather event, these insights pair with post-event imagery and damage analysis to speed up catastrophe response . After the California wildfires, Travelers settled total CAT losses 60% faster, because pre-event property baselines meant the comparison was already in place. Wed Jan 01 2025 Thu Jan 02 2025 Why property data quality is an insurance profitability decision There’s a straightforward financial logic to this. When AI-derived property insights cover 130+ characteristics per property (roof condition, structural deterioration, defensible space, property objects) and are updated multiple times throughout the year, the decisions that follow are not just accurate, but defensible. When Arden Insurance Services based their underwriting workflow on AI-derived property insights , they saw a 5.5% improvement in loss ratio. They also cut average underwriting time by 9%, per property. Both came down to the same thing: underwriters seeing current property condition at the time of quote. Better data = better profitability Top insurers today are quantifying the profitability gap that working to old data is creating. Carriers that have made the shift are seeing better loss ratios, reduced LAE, and better inspection spend. Carriers that haven’t are still absorbing those costs, they’re just distributed across the P&L in ways that are harder to trace back to a single root cause. The property knows the answer, it’s time to ensure your intelligence does too. Turn data into profit with complete property intelligence It's here. No waitlist required. Start Today
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Nearmap offers a single, continuous intelligence pipeline that supports everything from precise underwriting to more accurate claim payouts.
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A before-and-after view of Victorian fire impact
Nearmap post-catastrophe imagery captured the devastating extent of bushfire impact across regional Victoria in Australia — enabling insurance, government and emergency service agencies to triage their response more effectively, and help communities recover sooner.
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Building smarter in 2026: Five companies leading with property intelligence
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What Springfield Lakes revealed about disaster recovery
Analyzing the roofs that never truly recovered with AI data and property intelligence.
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Revealing housing and construction trends with AI
See how Solutions Engineer Sam Mason used AI-derived property insights and frequently updated imagery to reveal housing and construction trends in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. .
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