FAQ

Replacement Cost is the amount of money needed to completely rebuild your house considering today’s prices for materials, labor, location, construction methods, building codes and many other things. If you had to rebuild your house today, from scratch, what would it cost you all-in? That’s Replacement Cost.

The number of things about your home that goes into determining its replacement cost are many – too many to list here. It includes objective items such as:

• How is the home constructed?
• What is its architectural style?
• How big is the home? How many total square feet?
• What materials are used?
• What are the local costs for skilled and unskilled labor?
• Is the home on a slope or level ground? Can the site be easily accessed or are other homes blocking the way for heavy equipment?
• How have inflation and tariffs changed the price of materials over the last six to twelve months?

Replacement cost also includes some subjective factors such as:

• What quality of construction and attention to detail is there in the home?
• Has a natural disaster diverted materials and labor to other parts of the country making rebuilding your home take longer and be more expensive?
• Will there be a long wait time to special order unique materials or is everything in the home standard?
• How soon can local government building departments approve rebuilding your home?

These and many, many other inputs are fed into a sophisticated database that gathers information from hundreds of thousands of users to algorithmically estimate a home’s current replacement cost.

It depends. The calculation is based largely on public record data and the accuracy of that data can influence the replacement cost estimate.

For example: Let’s say the county assessor reports that your home has 1,950 square feet of finished living area. Great – that number gets fed into the calculator. But let’s also say that at some point your basement, which for many years was unfinished and not considered living space, was totally renovated with a media room, a guest bedroom, and a full bathroom. If the public records weren’t updated to reflect this additional living space, the replacement cost calculation would be too low and there may not be enough money available to rebuild should the home suffer a total loss. Make sense?

The Confidence Rating is an indicator of how complete the public record information for the subject property was found to be.  A Confidence Rating of 7 or higher means there was sufficient information in the available records to feel very good about the accuracy.  A Rating of 5 or 6 would suggest there was some information available, but it may have been missing a few details, or the accuracy is subjective.  A Rating of 4 or 5 means the data is somewhat unreliable and should be reviewed carefully.  A Rating of less than 4 tells us the data is of poor quality and therefore the calculation isn’t accurate.

We recommend you speak with your trusted insurance advisor and beware of the contractor’s opinion. There are countless things that can radically change the cost to rebuild a home including natural disasters, taxes and tariffs, supply chain disruptions and pandemics just to name a few that a contractor cannot account for in their opinion. Remember too, the insurance company has a contract with you to pay a certain amount. Is the contractor willing to guarantee it in writing?

Good question and in many cases the answer is “no”. It all comes down to the fine print in your homeowner’s insurance policy – the parts that only insurance nerds like to read. Quite often the policy will say something like, “…it’s your responsibility to select and maintain adequate amounts of insurance…”, and “…to assist you we will suggest changes…”.

In the end, the insurance company makes insuring your home to the right amount your problem but provides no access to information to solve that problem. This is exactly why we built this website – to help homeowners better understand what your home should minimally be insured for so that you can shop for the best possible rate and have the right level of protection.

For our tool to work, it needs a certain amount of credible data. The source of this data is public records which can vary widely. If the property you inquired about is newer – either new construction or it’s had a significant remodel – there may not have been enough time for the county assessor to update its database. If the home is older, those records are often manual property cards which may not be accessible online. In other cases, the state or county has restrictions to accessing this type of information behind various layers of security or additional pay walls.

It depends. If you have insurance, compare our estimated replacement cost number with what your policy says. If there’s a big difference, we suggest you call your insurance agent and talk about it.

You can also use this estimate to help shop for new insurance and call different companies and ask them to quote your coverage for the amount we’ve estimated. This gives you a place to start and compare prices.

The report you received is yours to keep and can be used by your trusted insurance advisor to ensure you’ve purchased the right amount of insurance at the right price. It’s meant to help but it isn’t meant to be the last word in coverage.

This is an estimate and it’s as good as any other estimate out there. The only true way to know how much money it would require to re-build your home is to rebuild it! This is a starting point and a way for you to have conversations about your insurance and how it all work with your agent or trusted advisor. We don’t guarantee the accuracy of this information, but we hope it’s helpful for you to further review what things really cost and to make good decisions.

If you find errors with the information we found about your home, know that it was sourced from publicly available records. You may want to check with the County Assessor or other government office and make corrections.

If you have more questions about our service, we invite you to review the FAQs in detail. You can also send us a note in the Contact section, and we will try to answer your question timely.