Insurers use drones to drain homeowners of coverage
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An empty swimming pool because the grandkids moved away and it’s too expensive to keep filled with water in drought-ridden California is a reason to cut insurance cover?
A property insurance company saw it as a matter of “deferred maintenance” and cancelled the owner’s policy, according to a report on ABC 7 in San Rafael, California, which interviewed several homeowners whose policies were cancelled after their insurer — using drone footage — found their properties too risky.
Property insurance in the Golden State is hard to come by, mostly due to wildfires, and insurance giants State Farm and Allstate stopped writing new policies altogether.
In addition to the pool owners, among the casualties are people found to have too much debris in their yard or an allegedly out-of-date roof. Residents complained that the policies were just cancelled, with no time to mitigate, according to the news report.
In defending its decisions to cancel policies using drone footage, CSAA Insurance Group told the news outlet that “(t)o continue offering industry-leading insurance coverage, we must periodically evaluate our exposure to risk … CSAA Insurance Group evaluates many sources of information to assess the condition of properties we insure, including third-party proprietary aerial imagery captured by fixed-wing aircraft and satellites.”
