Progressive has made available an online platform that lets homeowners quickly compare home insurance quotes from multiple carriers in a short amount of time. AIR Worldwide released what it bills as the industry’s first comprehensive severe thunderstorm model for Australia that explicitly captures all three sub-perils.

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Borrowing from its own auto insurance model, Progressive has unveiled HomeQuote Explorer, an online platform that allows homeowners to quickly compare home insurance quotes from multiple carriers.

The insurer says it takes 15 minutes or less to get most quotes.

The platform pulls in publicly available information on a property automatically to save the homeowner time, and has a series of prompts to help the user enter other required information, according to Dan Witalec, the insurer’s customer acquisition leader.

“For example,” said Witalec, “many people don’t know whether they have a gable, mansard, hip or gambrel roof. But HomeQuote Explorer uses photos of roof types to help homeowners quickly identify what they have. We wanted to make this easy.”

He said the platform will “keep getting smarter” and the insurer will add new features to make it even easier to get home insurance quotes online.

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AIR Worldwide released what it bills as the industry’s first comprehensive severe thunderstorm model for Australia that explicitly captures all three sub-perils—hail, tornado, and straight-line wind – to help companies assess and manage severe thunderstorm risk.

The catastrophe modeling firm’s AIR Severe Thunderstorm Model for Australia simulates daily severe thunderstorm activity based on historical occurrence rates and local and seasonal weather patterns. The daily simulation enables the model to capture both the large outbreaks that produce insured losses in excess of AUD 10 million—the ICA threshold for a catastrophe—and smaller events that may last only one day, but that could still impact a company’s portfolio on an aggregate basis, or a more rural portfolio on an occurrence basis.

The AIR model uses historical data from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) Severe Storms Archive, which comprises storm reports from a trained weather spotter network. To compensate for inherent bias from eyewitness reporting of the historical data, AIR employed a hybrid physical-statistical method to simulate hail, straight-line wind, and tornadoes in physically realistic locations, including areas that may not have experienced major activity in the brief historical record.

The model also simulates realistically clustered severe thunderstorm outbreaks using methodology that groups hail, wind, and tornadoes into spatially coherent patterns—patterns that would not be possible using random sampling alone.

AIR Worldwide is a Verisk Analytics business.

Sources: Progressive, AIR Worldwide/Verisk