Insurance companies are trying to bail on the California market and using any excuse to do so. The state insurance commissioner (an elected official) is said to be asleep at the switch, to the point that there is a grassroots movement to recall him, which to my knowledge has never happened.
The drone/aerial surveillance is the headline here, but the real issue is that insurers are unilaterally canceling policies without any sort of grace period or remediation possibility. Bear in mind that if you lose your home insurance and don't sign a new policy, a lender can and usually will foreclose upon it.
It's not that he's asleep at the switch. Rather, people blame the insurance commission when insurance gets expensive. However, when companies are leaving the market it's clear rates are too *low*.
Note that this is sometimes the result of those in high risk situations managing to get the legislature to require the risk to be spread to others to keep their rates from being insane. (Florida is a prime example--they're spreading the cost from property on the front line for hurricane damage across wider areas, so now everybody's insurance is high rather than some being completely uninsurable.)
While I have not kept up with the California situation I suspect something of the sort is going on, they aren't being allowed to look at local wildfire risk in setting premiums.
This is exactly the case. The commission won't let companies take adequate rate, so most companies are unable to make a profit in the state and are pulling out. Doesn't make sense to stay in a market where you're forced to lose money most years.
No sane company wants to leave a market the size of California on the table. They are leaving because the risk is just too high. There is nothing Commissioner Lara can do about the risk analysis associated with the previous 20 years of wildfire.
IF Californians don't change their collective behavior around addressing the issues related to wildfire risk, its unlikely they'll be able to maintain coverage.
But the guy isn't in a wildfire risk zone. He just has a slightly untidy yard in a suburb. And I do mean 'slightly', go watch the news report. It's not a junkyard and the company's argument here isn't credible.
The safer from wildfire standard and the wildfire prepared home standard would both identify the storage of those kinds of materials within the 0-5 foot zone as a hazard significant enough to not pass.
To you it may not seem significant but to a wildfire risk specialist, these are precisely the kinds of hazards were looking for.
The standards are high, but they are so for a reason. We're losing thousands of homes per season to wildfire.
Was it bad customer service to just drop him? Yes. Should he have the opportunity to mitigate? Absolutely.
But ignorance of your risk doesn't mean some one else is obligated to take the other side of that bet. I've said it a couple times else where. If insurance companies thought they could still be writing policies in California, they would. It's billions of dollars in annual premium they are passing on. They aren't doing so because, yes, storing tires against your house is significant enough of a risk factor to warrant non-renewal. Companies like State Farm would rather pull back entirely than accept the risk.
Sorry but have you looked at the pictures? There is zero risk to what he is doing. Its not just "me" its common sense that its not a risk. There is zero hazard here.
Last time I looked people were entitled to work on their own possessions on their own land. The guy has some neatly stacked spare tires and replacement wheels for his two motor vehicles and a work bench, he's not running a smelter or manufacturing explosives.
I'm not going to win points for defending a megacorp, but if this person wants to self-insure (and owns his home outright), then he would be entitled to do so. But until the mortgage is paid and he is able to self-insure, the insurance company sets the rules.
Put differently, if a fire were to happen and this open air mechanics/tire shop were to ignite and destroy the three neighboring properties, is this homeowner entitled enough to pay all damages caused by his negligent storage of combustible materials?
[edit] Plenty of notice should have been provided so the property owner had an opportunity to address the issues found, which may or may not have happened. We only have one side of the story here.
Put differently, if a fire were to happen and this open air mechanics/tire shop were to ignite and destroy the three neighboring properties
Again, a description like really misrepresents the facts. The guy appears to own 2, possible 3 motor vehicles, and has two sets of 4 tires. It looks as if he had hoped to upgrade one of his vehicles by putting some shiny new wheels on it. O am not a car guy, but this looked to me like some personal property stored in his yard, not a hobby that had spun out of control. If he had stored them in a shed or covered storage area nobody would have said anything (because they wouldn't have seen it) even though the risk would have been identical or greater. There's no particular reason to expect a fire to break out in the middle of a subdivision, tires aren't known for just spontaneously bursting into flame.
By contrast, in my neighborhood there is a tire business of some kind at one end of a residential street, which must have 2-300 tires stacked up, directly adjacent to a bunch of houses and a freeway overpass. They've been there for man¥ years so I assume it's a normal business with normal permits, even though it's a massive fire hazard with a higher risk of a fire breaking out from the unpredictable nature of commercial traffic, industrial equipment, vandalism/arson etc.
The main issue for insurance companies arises from a combination of California's increasingly hot and dry climate and the fact that most uses here are made out of wood and thus extremely susceptible to fire damage. The people rationalizing the insurance company's decision as if this guy somehow had it coming are BSing themselves.
5 cars. 1 on street, 3 porch, 1 tarp. Most likely two more in double garage.
>and has two sets of 4 tires
Over 30 tires, some truck sized (bigger than what that astro van? uses). Rusting engine block, heads, plus transmission case, exhaust and fender/hood in the grass.
Reporter material shows fresh garbage bags in the yard suggesting dude started cleaning the moment he got the rejection. Whats more drone footage looks to be recorded after on the ground clips, with backyard meticulously cleaned, things neatly stacked (still 6 piles of tires) and overgrowth mowed.
>in my neighborhood there is a tire business
In commercial zoning, paying commercial insurance.
I’ve never heard of a lender foreclosing for no insurance. Usually they’ll force sign you up for some captive insurance company or insurance of last resort, and add the cost onto your monthly payment.
> Usually they’ll force sign you up for some captive insurance company or insurance of last resort,
This has been my experience when the lender screws up and fails to accurately record the insurance information. Then, near the expiration date, when they check, and find nothing, one gets a nasty-gram in the mail berating one for failing to maintain insurance, and indicating that if they don't get proof of insurance within 15 days of the date on the letter (of which at least five days has usually already lapsed), they will apply their own insurance, to the tune of 4x the cost of the actual insurance that is still valid and active.
> Bear in mind that if you lose your home insurance and don't sign a new policy, a lender can and usually will foreclose upon it.
But if this happens in sufficient numbers, then lenders will likely rethink that policy. No lender wants to foreclose, and particularly if there's no chance that they'll be able to sell the property for enough to cover the costs of foreclosing.
I understand your sentiment, but the mortgage was issued conditional on maintaining home insurance.
Without an active policy, the lender is subject to much greater risk. If the house burns down sans insurance, the lender is now SOL.
And as the sibling response states, foreclosure is rarely a fast process. The problem is it can be very hard to find a policy if there's a gap in coverage, even more so if insurers are leaving the market.
I don't know about the US but in the UK you can sort out new insurance in a few minutes - though one of the questions is usually 'have you ever had an insurance policy canceled or refused' - answering yes to that can cause significant issues. Lying and getting found out later causes even more problems.
Similar here (varies by state). Switching from an active policy to a new policy is usually easy. Gaps in coverage, especially when a policy was canceled for cause, can be a problem.
CA and FL have their own problems due to local weather/climate (fires, hurricanes) and insurance regulations. Insurers are jacking up rates in FL and leaving that market. I'm not as familiar with CA, but it sounds like they're doing the same there.
Of course there is a grace period. Lenders lose a lot of money on the typical foreclosure and are in no rush to foreclose upon a property. They will work with the homeowner for a while to resolve any issues before resorting to foreclosure.
Normally they'll do a forced placement rather than foreclose. You'll get a bad deal on the insurance but there will be insurance on the house (not necessarily on anything else, though!)
Insurance companies dropping people without clear instructions or notice on how to become compliant is sort of wild. I can see how having a big pile of tires wouldnt be great. But what is “debris”? That could be anything.
Yep. This is something we've been working to address at my startup (https://wuuii.com/). We build software for doing these kinds of inspections. Getting property owners to take action is one of the critical steps in the process, but communicating clearly what needs to be done is something we focus on. We use a combination of aerial imagery and on the ground inspection to identify all of the issues and make specific mitigation recommendations.
Insurance is all about risk and when you are not uniform with the baseline then you become a risk. Whatever debris is doesn't really matter. It's that there is debris and that's what increases the insurance risk.
Cape Analytics' documentation says that UAV carries higher resolution than is necessary and most of their stuff is done with aerial fixed-wing aircraft. Not that it matters for how crazy this story is, I just wanted to inject some facts into the conversation.
Ok, so the issue isn't "aircraft controlled from ground vs aircraft controlled from the air", it's private property being spied on/inspected without consent or notice. That's illegal for a landlord, and should be illegal for insurance companies.
Moreover, their identification is (from the article) erroneous, and their risk claim is false (per the article the person is not in a fire zone). Failing to acknowledge those are erroneous and continuing to terminate the policy is BS, and I assume fraudulent: if the law allows an insurance company to do zero-notice termination of policy without a justification I'm sure that they would have done that instead, rather than providing any justification that could prove wrong.
Usually you use something like Nearmaps, Hexagon, or Vexcel.
These companies use multi camera oblique imagery that can get views down the side of houses were you can do a 'good-enough' job assessing at least some of the major factors for wildfire risk. Debris or outside storage would fall into this category.
Manned aircraft still way cheaper at scale. You can do whole counties in a day. Fly it 2-3 times a year and sell it to hundreds/ thousands of customers.
Unless the property is ridiculously expensive, don't expect any one to commission a flight for it.
Disclosure: I am a cofounder of a startup in Northern California focused on wildfire risk inspections and making recommendations to homeowners about what they can do to reduce their risk. I'm on the science side with a focus on the impacts of risk mitigation.
Dealing with outside storage and debris are part of both the Safer From Wildfire standard and the Wildfire Prepared Home standard. Addressing ember accumulation areas (read: any where leaves/ dust/ crap piles up) adjacent to a structure or any where else on a property is one of the easiest things a home owner can do to reduce their overall risk. Its cleaning up your yard and moving things that might catch on fire away from your house. If you have a problem with that and live in even a mild wildfire risk area, good luck maintaining coverage. This is the absolute lowest hanging fruit with regards to reducing wildfire risk.
I know the US isn't big on privacy, but a closed off backyard? Isn't this the definition of reasonable expectation of privacy? I mean, let's say his children were running around naked while the insurance company would have filmed them.
A major city near me regularly flies small aircraft (and now, drones) over private property in order to find construction being done without a permit. They've been doing this since at least the 80s.
Just saying that this sort of thing is far from new.
My country allows cities to fly aircraft looking for pools of untreated water, and the police has automatic powers to enter a property if they find any.
And neither your nor my example are nearly as problematic as the article. The article is an entirely new class of bad.
In the US, anyone is permitted to fly anywhere in unrestricted airspace, and anything in view of public property is considered to have no expectation of privacy.
There are lots of eyes in the sky these days--I don't think you really have an expectation of privacy in such a situation. (I would, however, say you are not guilty of indecent exposure or lewd and lascivious behavior--that requires you to have committed said acts where an unaided passerby could see.)
IANAL...but between all the legal language in the average American property insurance policy, plus all the laws which the insurance industry (& friends) have "encouraged" our politicians to pass, I'd bet "no" on the privacy.
Two big issues worth discussing here IMO:
1) Privacy rights in the age of aerial photography
2) Consumer rights in the age of subscription-dependence
Property insurance historically has some of the best consumer protections, its one of the oldest "private subscriptions" that fills a critical need. But new technology can easily disrupt a balance of power set decades ago.
This is nothing new for insurance. Aerial imagery has been in use for decades to address different perils. At least this homeowner had someone take a look before they were denied coverage. Most insurance companies will just write off whole zipcodes as 'lost' due to wildfire risk rather than get into this granular a level of detail.
The issue California faces isn't a technical one. Its a social/ behavior issue. Californians will need to change their behavior with regards to how they manage their personal property or the risk will continue to be too high for insurance companies to bear. These properties aren't struggling to get insurance because suddenly we have aerial imagery; they are struggling because the data regarding wildfire risk has become impeccably clear.
Individual actions can make an impact to their individual and community wildfire risk, but fundamentally wildfire risk is a network phenomena. It has to happen at scale. If a homeowner isn't willing to deal with debris piles on their property they are putting themselves and their community at risk. Should they get insurance?
You're putting the blame on the homeowner for a problem they weren't aware was a problem. In this specific case I don't see that the guy's yard, which is actually quite tidy, credibly increases fire risk. His insurance was canceled without him receiving any option for appeal or remediation. That's BS. You'd be made if something similar happened to your business, and it's not a good basis on which to shill for your clients.
My clients are home owners who are looking to do what it takes to avoid a non-renewal and mitigate/ reduce their personal wildfire risk. We give them the reports and data necessary to challenge a non-renewal. He can hop on our website right now and schedule an inspection. We service the entire bay area.
But I can tell you this right now, with what I saw in the video he won't pass. He's storing combustibles too close to the structure. It puts him at significant risk.
At my company we see customer service as the top priority and try to partner with homeowners to both understand their risk and take action. This is why we focus our reporting so much on education around the issue and communication about what matters for risk.
Ultimately however, the onus is on the homeowner to take action. It's no one's responsibility but theirs to understand and mitigate their risk. I think many home owners are naive as to how high their risk really is. Look at the reaction to Oregon's recent risk maps. The maps were accurate, and the public panicked. Now they are wordsmithing the science to down play the risk. Rearranging the deck chairs does nothing about the underlying hazard.
Based on some of the other comments, the consumer protection in CA is so good that insurance providers are noping out (All State, State Farm, etc), and as always the average citizen gets shafted by poorly thought out policies.
I get that the horse allows the artist to see over the top of the fence into the yard without a ladder, but could we rely on the horse staying still during the drawing process?
Just wait until it’s a fully automated system. This is still someone doing investigations at the moment. In the not too distant future, surveillance will determine rates and not just policy eligibility.
Some personal context: I've been doing aerial photography as a side hustle for a couple of years now. There are several sites out there that offer one-off jobs for bid. While you usually don't know who your ultimate client is, I've done probably ~25 of those that were obviously for insurance purposes. All but two were commercial properties; those two were homes where the owner was also operating a business out of an outbuilding, so it's reasonable for me to believe that they were also for commercial insurers.
From the drone operator's side, the pay for this kind of work ranges from ~$50-150. Based on the research I've done into the companies posting jobs on these sites, they seem to be charging ~$200. I'm sure large customers with lots of jobs get a significant discount, too.
TL;DR: The ubiquity of drones these days has driven the cost of this sort of data collection way, way down.
I was in LA during the northridge earthquake, insurance companies were putting in double time looking for ways to prevent having to pay for damages to homes. I remember driving down streets and seeing garages spray painted with "State farm refuses to pay on my claim". I'd be happy to pay into a system that isn't driven by pure profit.
State Farm is a mutual insurance company [1] - all the "profits" are sent back to the policyholders as rebate checks. Of course, that also means that they don't have unlimited pools of money to pay out claims during big disasters.
Depending on the wording of his policy they might even have had the right to just walk into their yard, that's what my parents insurance company did. They also had their policy cancelled.
Would they be within their rights to lie about having done so? The all-seeing, eye in the sky drone can be to lie about evidence or its sources. To me, that is the bigger issue here.
That’s exactly what they are doing. They are profiling for risk and thinning their portfolio with anything aberrant or risk-inducing.
Insurance companies also use location data for this. All of the data people aren’t concerned about losing on social networks and cell providers is being used for these purposes too. And it’s really just started since 2018 or so to get implemented in insurance companies.
The insurance companies are always looking for mitigation technologies that help reduce portfolio risk. Their biggest problems have been dealing with the tidal wave of data and determining what data is worth using for evaluation purposes, but from what I’ve seen they’re starting to figure it out. Might seem arbitrary to drop some guy for his cluttered yard, but it’s so very not.
Just wait, without guaranteed rights to privacy it’s going to be a pretty massive tidal wave of “personalized insurance rates” based on a plethora of data people can’t quite conceive of at the moment.
But, hypothetically, if the insurance company did this ... it's not a privacy violation. Your "right to privacy" doesn't extend so far as to forbid your insurer from viewing your property.
> Your "right to privacy" doesn't extend so far as to forbid your insurer from viewing your property.
I'd say it does, when they view parts of my property that I've walled off from ordinary view. It's reasonable to expect that photos of me won't be taken when I'm in my private backyard. My neighbors can't see into the yard. Pedestrians and motorists can't.
Yeah, random pilots flying overhead can look out their window and see me. But a targeted flight done for the purpose of photographing my private backyard (among other features) is a different scenario, IMO. I should be given a chance to deny this.
(Of course, maybe I already granted permission in Sec. II, Paragraph 34(c)(iii) of my insurance contract. I should read that.)
unsurprisingly, you are completely backwards. The ability to anticipate inspection, and respond to demands, is central to property law -- law in the making for hundreds of years. The new twist is the ability to take high-resolution evidence from a distance, without announcing it, and keep that evidence unknown to the property owner.
To call back a previous post: Is it a car in the park though?
We can all likely agree that trespassing physically on the property is not allowed.
But that's not what happened here. They were in airspace they were allowed to be in. They managed to view the property with equipment good enough to see what was in the area.
If you get high enough, you don't even need to go over the area itself. Hell, one of my neighbors has a house near enough my backyard that they can see clear over the fence from their upper floor.
The issue is the adversarial nature of it, vs your insurance company calling you and making an inspection, or telling you they noticed a problem and asking you to address within a reasonable timeframe. I think you understand this just fine.
Sure. They can contact me, arrange a time, and then go through. Just as required if they were a landlord renting out property to me.
We could put it another way: police also ostensibly protect your property, should they also have unfettered access to it to ensure you're not doing anything that might increase the risk of intervention on your property?
My life insurance required me to submit to a standard physical exam by the company’s chosen medical professionals. If I were a bit older at the time, as a male I assume this exam would have included a prostate exam.
The drone/aerial surveillance is the headline here, but the real issue is that insurers are unilaterally canceling policies without any sort of grace period or remediation possibility. Bear in mind that if you lose your home insurance and don't sign a new policy, a lender can and usually will foreclose upon it.