Getting A Line on Insurance

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Getting A Line on Insurance
Stanley at site of burned Malibu home.

Bradford Stanley lost his Malibu home in a 2007 canyon fire. Six months later, he lost out on about $300,000 in insurance. That’s because he hadn’t made a complete inventory of his home’s contents before the fire and adjusted his coverage accordingly.

The insurance company paid about $100,000 of his estimated $400,000 in losses.

“It was low because we hadn’t tallied the property totals to match up with our policy,” Stanley said. “Had we had a chance to do a home inventory and reassess the value, we would have realized that we were underinsured.”

Sensing that many other people would be in the same position if they had a comparable disaster, Stanley took his experience as a website designer and real estate photographer to create DocuHome, an online home inventory program for the Facebook age.

Once a customer subscribes, he or she can upload digital photographs of their possessions to the site. Then the customer “tags” each image with descriptions and value. The tags then appear on a spreadsheet. All the information is then preserved by the customer’s account. Subscriptions cost $59 a year. The site has a couple of hundred subscribers, which Stanley hopes to grow.

An insurance agent noted that documentation is always essential, so he sees DocuHome as providing a valuable service.

“If you have photos or receipts or video it makes it a lot easier to document a claim,” said Phil Gajic, an agent at Mark Ball Insurance in Malibu, who advises all of his clients to take photographs or video of possessions. “You’re in Malibu and the threat of wildfires is strong.”

Stanley believes one of his selling points is that his system is fairly fast and simple.

“I feel that I’ve really homed in with how the user interacts with the site so it can be done in hours,” he said.

Another advantage: The record of the inventory is out of the house and can be accessed from any browser.

A 2008 survey conducted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners found that 48 percent of homeowners did not have an inventory of their possessions. Of the 52 percent with an inventory, 32 percent had not taken any photos.

An insurance expert said that by making the process easier, DocuHome might encourage people to overcome the psychological barrier of planning for the worst.

“You don’t want to think about ‘What if my house goes down?’ ” said Joanne Ho, a natural resource economist at the University of Washington’s School of Forest Resources.

Ho wondered, however, if DocuHome’s easier service would be enough.

“I think a lot of people buy Internet services that they won’t use,” she said.

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