Home Policy Details on P&C Insurance Sites: Best Practices

With ramped up home improvement spending, today’s homeowners want to be able to update their home policy details with their insurance firm. See best practice examples from a recent report.

Over the past few years, homeowners have drastically ramped up home improvement project spending—up from $328 billion in 2019 to $472 billion in 2022—in part due to COVID-19 quarantine mandates that kept people confined to their homes. While professional home improvement projects dropped, DIY renovations exploded as homeowners channeled their pent-up energy and sought to improve their living spaces. Interestingly, 86% of residents who completed one home improvement project felt motivated to renovate other parts of their homes. This trend is expected to continue into 2024 with projected home improvement spending at $485 billion.

Though it is exciting to witness the rise in home investment and its positive impact on ROIs and the housing market at large, it is important to note that natural disaster events continue to rise in both frequency and severity as well, necessitating increasingly costly home reconstruction efforts. In the face of these factors—which foreshadow a troubling underinsurance problem for the ever-developing property market—it is imperative that home insurance carriers provide an intuitive online platform where users can catalogue and proactively update their home characteristic information. Keeping property information up to date helps insurers better assess home risk, enables homeowners to be confident in their coverage status and allows for easier disaster recovery for both parties.

Our recent Home Policy Details and Managing Home Characteristics report evaluates the property insurance information, self-service options and home characteristic editing capabilities on 13 insurance carriers’ policyholder desktop sites, plus Hippo’s mobile app. Most of the insurers in our coverage set (8) scored Fair or Poor, identifying the need to address lacking home policy features across the industry. Insurers that want to better serve home policyholders and retain a more complete picture of insured properties should strive to adhere to the following best practices:

Leverage digital tools to help customers visualize policy information

As home insurance becomes harder and more costly to obtain, it is important that insurers offer educational resources that teach users about the coverages they do have. Serious errors are common when users quote and buy a home policy without the support of these resources: some users do not realize flood damage is not covered by a standard home policy, while others mistakenly insure their home for market value instead of replacement value.

To mitigate these problems, Travelers goes the extra mile to provide excellent digital resources. Intrapage tabs act as jumplinks to pertinent policy information sections below and tooltips provide on-demand coverage definitions. Impressively, the Property Coverage section on the home policy detail page offers an excellent visual representation of which coverages apply to different areas of the home and allows users to easily browse and read about common coverages.

Go beyond coverage and deductible details and include a robust summary of an insured property’s characteristics

American homeowner’s expenditures for improvements and repairs are expected to keep climbing through the first half of 2025, according to a recent JCHS LIRA report. Given this high level of activity, it is important that insurers provide accurate, up-to-date digital records of a policyholder’s property and home characteristics. Yet, few coverage group insurers prioritize this content and instead focus on home policy information. Only Hippo, PURE and USAA provide dedicated pages for home characteristic information. Of these, USAA stands out for the Home Characteristics tab on its Home Insurance Account Summary page, which includes an extensively detailed overview of covered property characteristics.

Allow users to easily update their home characteristics online

Insurers must go beyond providing a digital record of a policyholder’s home characteristics and offer users the means to update the recorded information digitally. Only four insurers in our report—Hippo, Liberty Mutual, PURE and USAA—allow users to update their home characteristics via a self-service transaction. Hippo’s mobile app features a Your Home Health section with attractive self-service transactions that enable policyholders to add new home features and update home details, while Liberty Mutual allows users to edit home characteristics via an easy-to-use Policy Change: Home Improvement flow with ample resources and explanatory content.

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