Can a Drone Improve a Commercial Inspection?

Can a Drone Improve a Commercial Inspection?
When the FAA loosened the rules surrounding the use of commercial drones in August of 2016, many insurance carriers began experimenting with the use of drones in the commercial inspection process.
When the FAA loosened the rules surrounding the use of commercial drones in August of 2016, many insurance carriers began experimenting with the use of drones in the commercial inspection process.

When physically evaluating the risk of a property, insurance inspectors put themselves at risk of injury–or even death–on a daily basis. Trying to inspect areas of a property that are difficult to access could expose inspectors to a number of hazards.

What are the advantages of using a drone in a commercial inspection?
The advantage of incorporating drones into the commercial inspection process is that it provides insurance carriers with an efficient solution to identify hazards before they become dangerous. Rather than having an inspector climb on top of a property’s roof, the inspector can use the drone to safely capture these images from the ground.

Today’s drones offer a number of capabilities to enhance the commercial inspection process, such as mapping sites, 3-D modeling, and aerial inspection. As drone technology continues to advance, it will be able to deliver even more detailed data that will prove valuable in underwriting risk.

Will drones replace in-person property inspections?
With the rise in the use of drone technology in property inspections, some question whether an in-person property inspection will be needed in the future.

The best answer is that drone technology is a way to complement the in-person commercial inspection process. The property inspector can use the drone to remotely identify areas of concern with the property and then focus his or her time on those areas during the inspection.

So, instead of a property inspector walking the roof of a building to look for a needle in a haystack, the data provided by the done will make the inspector aware of exactly where he or she needs to look. In this scenario, the data that the drone provided limits the amount of time that the inspector needs to be on the roof, helping to create a safer and more efficient property inspection.

How Insurance Risk Services Uses Technology to Deliver Accurate Underwriting Support
Our team at Insurance Risk Services has been providing high-quality underwriting support to property and casualty insurance carriers for more than 35 years. We use the latest inspection technology to provide our clients with accurate property reports so that they can best determine which risks are worth taking.

While technology is playing a growing role in the insurance industry, it’s important that we use it to enhance the processes that we already have in place. While a drone can improve commercial inspections, it should not be the only information that insurance carriers use to underwrite a property’s risk.

Contact us at Insurance Risk Services to learn more about how we’re using technology to provide the most accurate underwriting support in the industry.

We’re delighted to announce that Insurance Risk Services will rebrand to Davies in the near future.

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