CLUE An Insurance Database

A newspaper article (Boston Herald, I believe) shared below as info. It's not particularly a CREDIT issue, but I thought it might be of interest to our community because the concept seems to clearly parallel the "National Credit Repository" (how I personally DETEST that attempt at legitimization !!) and reporting concept.

I'd enjoy hearing feedback from the insurance experts on the board? Thanks !

Mark

(begin article quote)

LOOKING INTO CLUE
(Washington)--Do you have even the slightest clue about CLUE?
Do you know that an innocent phone call to your insurance agent asking about the deductible on your homeowner's policy could trigger an electronic loss report on your home to a national database, even if you never file a claim and pay for all repairs yourself? Sound Bizarre?
Welcome to the emerging Alice-in-
[HOUSING UPDATE
Kenneth R. Harney}
Wonderland world of homeowners insurance, where not only you have a personal three-digit risk score, but your house has its own separate electronic dossier accessible by insurance companies nationwide. Depending on what's in the dossier, your house may already be stigmatized as high risk -- rendering it more difficult to sell since insurance may be unavailable or extremely expensive to a prospective buyer.
Worse yet, your "homeowners insurance score" could be tainted by the scoring software's heavy reliance on your personal credit file data -- information which recent national studies have documented to be frequently riddled with errors.
What is CLUE and what does it do? The abbreviation stands for Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange. It is a privately run national electronic database for the insurance industry, located in Alpharetta, GA. Insurers who write over 90 percent of America's homeowners policies contribute information to it, covering more than 40 million claims records on homes.
Each house has its own discrete file that lists every claim or property-damage-related information supplied by local agents over the last five years. Even if the file indicates a zero-payout loss -- where the agent learned of damage below the deductible threshold through an inquiry by the homeowner -- the file may contain a loss notation on the property record.
To the insurance industry, the CLUE database is an invaluable source of risk-prediction information. In the words of Joe Annotti, vice president for public affairs of the National Association of Independent Insurers, CLUE "is just an automated loss history (database) that speeds up the process of underwriting and pricing insurance." It is nothing more sinister than the 200-million-plus credit files maintained on Americans by the private, national credit repositories -- Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. But CLUE reports and homeowner insurance scores can also be unseen, leaden weights on houses and their owners. Houses with just a couple of small claims listed on a CLUE report can suddenly be more difficult to sell. A homeowner who filed a damage claim on her last property in one state may find her score too low to qualify for insurance on a house she wants to buy in another state.
Both she and her former house may carry insurance stigmas -- the new scarlet letters of American real estate -- for years. To see a description of the CLUE system and obtain your own home's current CLUE report, you can go to www.choicetrust.com The cost online is $12.95. You can also obtain your homeowners insurance for the same price.
The CLUE system -- and rapidly rising homeowners insurance rates nationwide -- have prompted the formation of a special task force by the National Association of Realtors. The group is expected to make recommendations for reforms to the 890,000-strong association next month at a meeting in Washington.
One of the task force's members, Nick D'Ambrosia of LaPlata, Md., cites what he calls a typical example of how the CLUE database can trigger unexpected problems for homeowners. The CLUE report on a house in Upper Marlboro, Md., included two relatively minor insurance claims -- one for a ruptured water heater that spilled onto the basement floor. But, says D'Ambrosia, "that was enough to stigmatize the property" and render it difficult to insure by its unsuspecting purchaser. Six major insurers turned down the buyer's applications for insurance.
How should you handle the tricky realities of homeowners insurance? For starters, order a copy of you home's CLUE report so you know what it contains. If you are buying a home, ask the seller for a copy of the CLUE report as a contract contingency item.

(end article quote)

 

Thanks, Breeze and George...I DID do a search and did come up with quite a few hits (using CLUE and Underwriting). I didn't see anything quite as thorough as this article, so thought I'd post it for folks who might not realize such a system is in place.

No agenda, just intending to be helpful and maybe give something back.

Mark