Home Subscribe Advertising Contact info Industry Links Company &    Ratings Search Daily service Email Us

Confusing valuations hurt brokers’ image, Dueck says     © Thompson’s World Insurance News 2009. No reproduction without written consent.     Brokers and insurers need to clean up the “fiasco” of confusing home evaluation methods or risk losing more business to direct writers, warns Alberta brokers association president Ken Dueck.     In his regular column in The Alberta Broker Mr. Dueck said the lengthy lists of items and questions on evaluation forms are incomprehensible to brokers, underwriters and customers alike and make brokers appear incompetent in the customers’ eyes.     “To think that this produces anything close to a rebuild cost is laughable at best,” Mr. Dueck wrote.     “This is not what these same customers experience when they contact our direct-writing competition that slowly steals 1% of our market share each year.”     The ceo of the Insurance Brokers Association of Manitoba counsels a measured — and united — approach to the problem.     Dave Schioler said IBAM was contemplating its own test of evaluation software against home builders’ actual costs, but shelved that plan when January’s Insurance Brokers Association of Canada meeting in Toronto showed the problem needed a national solution.     “There’s no point in every region trying to do their own thing.”     More in our February 16 edition.        Thompson’s World Insurance News P.O. Box 1027,  Waterloo, Ontario,  Canada  N2J 4S1 Tel: 519-579-2500 Fax: 519-745-7321 mpub@sympatico.ca THOMPSON’S WORLD INSURANCE NEWS , Canada’s only independent weekly for p&c insurance professionals, has been the industry’s most trusted news source since 1988.