Insurance Risk Metrics

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Lightstone provides extensive insurance related datasets and unique indices and metrics to assist insurers in underwriting and pricing its property risk exposures. These include providing residential property Replacement Cost Valuations (RCV) and providing risk indices for flooding, lightning, hail, fire, subsidence, earthquakes and crime.

Flooding:

Assigns a risk index based the distance of each property to the closest water body and the height of that property above or below the water level. We calculate the distance, within ten kilometers, from the centroid of a property to the boundary of the nearest body of water according to three risk categories. Once we identify the nearest waterbody, we provide the type of water body and the distance, in meters, between the body of water and each property.

Lightning and hail:

Measures a property's exposure to lightning and hail damage based on the reported lightning density per square km, adjusted for altitude. Lightstone derives lightning and hail data from several weather sources which have been modelled and spatially mapped to suburb level. One such model determines the Lightning flash density (LFD), which is calculated using the number of lightning flashes or strikes per square kilometer per year in an area.

Dolomite:

The dolomite data provided helps to assess the potential risk of sinkholes developing in the ground below a property and considers the presence of dolomite, sinkholes and mines in the area. Presence of dolomite determines whether a property is established over dolomite and susceptible to the associated risk.

Earthquakes:

Analyses whether a property is located in an earthquake-prone region based on historical tremor intensity and frequency.

Crime:

Lightstone derives crime risk from the annually published SAPS crime statistics. This data has been smoothed spatially across adjacent police precincts to reflect a realistic view of crime in a particular area. The crime measure consists of the number of crimes per 1 000 households and annual crime growth rate for residential, non-residential and motor crimes.

Proximity:

Reviews the distance of the property from several key points of interest such as police stations, fire stations and airports.

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