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Home insurance is becoming more expensive and difficult to obtain across the country, and now homeowners have a new concern: drone flights. As the cost of providing coverage continues to rise, insurers are taking more measures to limit their potential losses. One of those measures is the use of drones to inspect the properties of policyholders. This is leading to a wave of homeowners receiving cancellation notices due to drone footage.
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Imagine you’re a homeowner who has faithfully paid your premiums for decades and never filed a claim. You’d think you’d be the perfect policyholder. But one day, you walk to your mailbox and find a cancellation notice from your home insurance company. What’s even more shocking than the cancellation itself is the grainy drone photo of your roof that’s being cited as the reason for the cancellation.
This recently happened to Daytona Beach, Florida resident Mike Arman. He told the New York Post that his policy was canceled after his insurance company flew a drone over his house and took photos that led them to claim his roof looked “deteriorated.” At least that’s the explanation Arman’s insurance agent gave him, but Arman is still frustrated by the experience for a variety of reasons.
First, Mike had been an insurance policyholder in good standing for more than 50 years. Second, he felt that the photo the drone took of his roof that prompted the cancellation was of poor quality. He told the New York Post that the photo itself looked as if it had been taken from a considerable distance by a “distant satellite.” But the real problem for Mike Arman is that his roof was only six years old.
In most cases, the lifespan of roofs like the one Arman had installed on his home is between 20 and 30 years. He naturally thought there had to be a mistake, so he contacted his insurance company and asked them to send someone out to personally assess his roof. After the insurance company told him that they “didn’t do home inspections,” Arman sent his insurance company documentation that showed the relatively young age of his roof.
Unfortunately for Arman, none of that mattered to his insurer, which went ahead with the cancellation a few months later. The cancellation came at the most inopportune time possible. Florida is in the midst of a major insurance crisis, marked by major insurers leaving the state and the remaining insurers raising premiums at an almost geometric rate.
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It’s left millions of Florida homeowners like Arman without a viable insurance option besides the state-sponsored Citizens Insurance Company. This time, Arman thought he’d be proactive and hire an inspector to certify his roof. Despite his home inspector’s approval, Arman got another nasty surprise in the mail when his Citizens policy came up for renewal.
It turns out that Citizens is also using drones to inspect homes, and after a flyover of his home, they decided to raise his premiums by 25%. For insurance companies and their shareholders, this policy of inspecting homes via drone seems like a good thing. Drone technology allows them to “visit” more homes than they ever could in person, and with the increased cost of covering claims, proactively mitigating risk allows them to stay in business.
On the other hand, homeowners like Arman feel like their insurers are “spying” on them and that the cancellation process lacks 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’s more accurate.
Friedlander concludes that drones can sometimes make mistakes, but he says (without citing any data to back up his conclusions) that aerial surveillance is “10-20 times more accurate” than inspections done by human eyes. On the other hand, homeowners are shocked to learn that cancellations via aerial surveillance photos are even legal.
Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told the New York Post that “there is a need for updated insurance regulations. State law has not caught up with the technology yet.” In the meantime, he advises homeowners to be proactive in removing potential hazards from their yards in preparation for drone surveillance. He said, “Don’t wait until you get a letter saying your policy is not going to renew.”
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This article Could You Be the Next Homeowner Whose Insurance Gets Pulled Due to Drone Surveillance? originally appeared on Benzinga.com
