Finding £1.17bn in missing rebuild value across 355 commercial properties 

The insurer needed to review a large property group client’s commercial portfolio. Its spreadsheet listed 355 properties valued individually at approximately £1m to £20m, but many addresses were incomplete and the existing rebuild figures had not been consistently validated. Hotels, warehouses, factories, shops and offices required different building assumptions and construction rates. 

A conventional manual reinstatement assessment can take 60 to 90 minutes per property. At a 75 minute midpoint, this portfolio would represent about 444 hours of specialist work before producing a consolidated view of the exposure. The insurer needed a reliable assessment at portfolio scale and within a much shorter timeframe. 

The insurer uploaded its spreadsheet to the Intelligent Rebuild Cost Platform. The platform cleaned and validated addresses, augmented each record with property information and COPE data, and assigned the appropriate occupancy or property type. COPE describes Construction, Occupancy, Protections and Exposure: the characteristics insurers need to understand what they are insuring. 

The platform then applied regional construction cost modifiers and added allowances for demolition, professional fees and external works. It generated a professional-grade rebuild cost estimate for each property in seconds and delivered the results in a portfolio analysis dashboard. This project involved commercial buildings; the same platform supports residential property valuations. Intelligent AI’s property datasets cover 40 million UK properties and more than 150 million US properties. 

The portfolio had been recorded at just over £5bn. Intelligent AI estimated a total rebuild cost of £6.17bn, exposing approximately £1.17bn in missing declared value. A portfolio dashboard made the difference visible by property and across the full group, giving the insurer a practical basis for reviewing sums insured and prioritising further checks. 

The insurer was charging £7.5m in annual premium. At an indicative commercial property rate of £1,000 to £2,000 per £1m insured, a rate of around £1,620 per £1m on the revised £6.17bn valuation points to approximately £10m. That is a potential £2.5m annual increase in gross premium, subject to underwriting, coverage, rating and adoption of the revised values. The project overall delivered approx. £83 of additional gross premium for each £1 spent, and freed up scares and valuable resources to spend more time advising clients on reducing risk.