50 minutes to a measurement. Here's what that does to your LAE.
May 2026
Fast, accurate, and consistent roof and exterior measurements have long been a challenge for claim adjusters. Legacy, manual workflows require significant documentation, and even digitized processes often hinge on adjuster capacity or subjectivity.
May 2026
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Not every adjuster is equipped to handle every type of roof claim. Some might not even be comfortable getting on the roof. Others might not have the tools or the right expertise to go up on a roof safely and take an accurate measurement. Catastrophic events make this process harder.
This can lead to inconsistent decisioning, increased costs, slower cycle times, missed details, and inaccurate payouts.
However, there is a way to transform the roof and exterior measurement process into a more efficient and cost-effective workflow. Strategic investment, like having a secondary measurements vendor, enables teams to conduct faster measurements, reduce costs, improve indemnity accuracy, and streamline settlements.
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Why your measurement workflow needs an integrated partner
A complete claims workflow draws on accurate data without adding to adjuster workload. Aerial-imagery-derived measurements offer the clearest advantage. Lower cost, faster turnaround, and higher accuracy than manual methods.
Most insurers piece together their claims measurement workflow from disconnected point solutions, each covering one part of the process, none owning the whole. When CAT volume spikes, that fragmentation becomes a liability. Turnaround times stretch, SLAs slip, and backlogs compound at exactly the moment they can least afford to.
Working with a property intelligence partner that owns the full stack; imagery, analysis, measurements, and pricing, removes that fragmentation risk entirely. There is no handoff between vendors, no inconsistency between data sources, and no chain of dependencies to fail under pressure. Decisions are more defensible, and outcomes improve because the data behind them is consistent.
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What to look for in a measurement partner
The measurement partner behind a claims workflow matters. Accuracy, delivery speed, and workflow integration are the baseline, not differentiators.
Nearmap Roof Measurements and Exterior Measurements are 98.4% accurate against physical hand measurements, with a maximum variation of 2.2%, well within the industry-standard waste factor applied by contractors. These measurements completely sync directly with the Verisk XactAnalysis/Xactimate workflow too.
Processing more than one million measurements annually, with roof measurement coverage now reaching 100% of insurable properties, Roof and Exterior Measurements are built to scale with claim volume, including during peak CAT season.
Cost is the other factor. A transparent pricing model lets claims teams budget clearly and avoid the overspend that comes with complex, volume-variable vendor arrangements.
Nearmap provides more than 1 million measurements per year.
Improved indemnity accuracy
Better accuracy translates into fewer litigation costs and satisfied policyholders. Accurate reports with wireframes and detailed measurements boost accuracy at both the analysis and pricing stages of the claim process.
What does accuracy look like? Contractors typically apply a 10% waste factor to roof and exterior measurement repairs, Haag Engineering’s independent third-party report commissioned by Nearmap revealed that Nearmap’s measurements are well within that range. Haag Engineering physically measured 39 roofs across the U.S. and compared hand measurements to Nearmap’s 3D-enabled measurement results.
The result: highly accurate. Nearmap’s total roof area across the 39 roofs was only 0.1% different from Haag’s manual measurements, with an absolute variation of 1.6% per building and 2.2% per individual roof section, well within the 10% waste factor.
A complete measurement workflow supports defensibility with regulators, reinsurers, and policyholders. When data is consistent, independently validated, and traceable to a single integrated source, the decisions built on it are easier to stand behind, at the claim level and across the portfolio.
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Accelerated cycle times
Faster claims settlement improves customer satisfaction. But antiquated workflows in roof and exterior measurements drag out the settlement time. In a CAT scenario, this can feel excruciating for policyholders and adds stress to adjusters as claim demand rises.
Speed matters, no matter what vendors or methods you work with. The earlier you can receive an accurate measurement and pricing estimate, the faster you can close a claim.
Traditional solutions take days to provide a roof report. That wait time becomes shorter and shorter as aerial technology evolves. Nearmap delivers SLA-backed residential roof measurements in as little as 50 minutes and commercial roof measurements in about 6 hours, into Verisk Xactimate/XactAnalysis or via API.
Claims teams that access fast, accurate measurements within the same workflow recover customers faster, and give them a reason to stay.
Roof measurements in as little as 50 minutes.
Reduced LAE
Both traditional workflows and some digital solutions require carriers to deploy adjusters to get measurements. But inefficient deployment increases loss adjustment expense (LAE). Settlements are already expensive, with roof claims alone costing $31 billion in 2024, and finding ways to reduce LAE has become a priority.
In CAT scenarios the problem compounds. Adjusters are deployed without damage priority data, visiting properties blind. Each unnecessary site visit adds travel, accommodation, and analysis cost to a claim that aerial assessment could have triaged remotely.
Property intelligence integrated into the claims workflow removes that overhead. Post-event imagery and AI-powered damage analysis enable remote triage before field teams are deployed. Guaranteed material pricing, both localized and accurate, means estimates are right from the first pass. Repairability analysis identifies where repair is viable rather than replacement, protecting against over-indemnification.
When measurements, pricing, and damage analysis work from the same integrated platform, LAE falls because accuracy compounds at every stage. Claims settle faster, defend more easily, and cost less to close.
Palisades Wildfire
January 2025
A complete claims workflow, built on one platform
With Nearmap as the connected property intelligence layer behind the claims workflow, teams reduce operational risk, price more accurately, and resolve claims faster, with measurably lower LAE per claim.
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Nearmap is doubling down on its investment in claims modernization. The latest enhancements to Roof & Exterior Measurements reflect that commitment: guaranteed residential roof measurements delivered in as little as 50 minutes, 98.4% validated accuracy independently verified by Haag Engineering, and expanded coverage now reaching 100% of insurable properties.
Improved and simplified pricing is designed to help reduce claim costs, while enhanced PDF reports (including precise measurements, 3D property models, sketch diagrams, and historical aerial imagery) give adjusters everything they need in a single output. And with easy delivery directly into Verisk XactAnalysis® and Xactimate®, there’s no new workflow required.
Fast, accurate roof measurements
Whether you need just the roof or also the walls, windows, and doors, you can now access precise Roof Measurements and Exterior Measurements from Nearmap via Verisk XactAnalysis®.
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