3 Ways for Insurers to Spread Catastrophe Risk Literacy to Homeowners, Minimal Lift Required

This post is part of a series sponsored by Cotality.

Homeownership has long been synonymous with the American Dream. And it’s no wonder: owning property allows you to customize where you live, build stability, and, perhaps most importantly, it gives you the opportunity to build long-term wealth.

Homeownership, however, is only an act of wealth-building for as long as you can afford to protect your home in any scenario. Otherwise, the investment is a gamble.

Sustainable homeownership requires risk literacy — deep knowledge of catastrophe risks, the varying threats disasters pose to properties, and what can be done to mitigate their impact. Risk literacy also involves an understanding of how insurance works, catastrophe risk coverage options, and the financial impacts and protection limitations of different policies.

Risk literacy is the knowledge basis homeowners need to secure truly adequate property insurance. Without this knowhow, they are more likely to settle for the minimum coverage required by their mortgage companies, without understanding alternative or expanded protections.

Also, with risk insights and literacy, policyholders are more apt to pursue proper home mitigation measures that fortify their properties against disaster (and potentially lower insurance rates).

This is all critical to sustainable homeownership, and therefore, to the institution of property insurance.

The Best Brokers of Risk Literacy

Insurers are well positioned to initiate proactive homeowner risk education, with underwriters and risk managers having the best access to catastrophe and hazard data.

Setting up your underwriting and risk management functions to be more collaborative with customer-facing roles is an effective way to establish a tradition of promoting risk literacy for policyholders early in the journey of homeownership.

Here are three simple steps insurers can take to start promoting risk literacy, without overhauling operations.

1. Build communication channels between underwriting/hazard risk professionals and customer-facing teams

Spreading risk literacy starts with the insights you already have — namely from advanced catastrophe risk models that continually generate updated information about different hazards and their potential for loss. For example, the peril-specific and composite risk models available from Cotality™ reveal the threats of flooding from rivers and lakes or provide historical data on fires or damaging hail in any specified region. These insights are pertinent for policyholders as they consider the value of higher priced, yet more comprehensive policies.

Underwriters and risk managers can share the deeper expertise they glean with customer-facing teams, streamlining insights so salespeople can effectively communicate risk information to clients.

When sales teams better understand evolving risk, they become empowered to both sell policies and educate policyholders about potential catastrophes that could impact their homes — as well as different ways to personalize their property insurance coverage accordingly.

With tailored risk literacy, insurance sellers and agents are more equipped to overcome objections to higher cost, yet necessary, coverage.

To facilitate this information exchange and uphold this new standard of communication, insurers can implement digital tools that make cross-functional collaboration quick and convenient.

Cotality’s industry-leading loss control management system, UnderwritingCenter™, plays a key role in spreading risk literacy. This underwriting workflow automation system condenses property and risk insights into streamlined reports, making it easier to make these risk insights more absorbable for customer-facing teams.

There’s a bonus to this set-up, too. Data-driven collaboration can ultimately extend to networking with mortgage lenders. In sharing insights with lenders, insurers can get earlier access to future policyholders, making it possible to deliver risk literacy even before potential homebuyers make major property-related decisions.

2. Lead marketing efforts with value-added messaging

The easiest way to educate homeowners about insurance before they realize they don’t have enough is through risk literacy-driven marketing content.

Insurance marketing teams can turn risk literacy insights from underwriting or risk management into value-added messaging on different channels through different forms: website content, thought leadership, email campaigns, and social media posts.

Social media posts may provide the perfect forum for providing interesting information about risk, provoking people to think about their own risk literacy.

Targeted email campaigns can deliver relevant insights to homeowners in high-risk regions. The possibilities are endless for risk literacy marketing, which invites engaging conversations about customizing property insurance accordingly.

The earlier policyholders are introduced to risk literacy, the less likely they are to experience sticker shock when making insurance decisions. When cost is not the sole focus, customers are better positioned to thoughtfully assess what coverage best supports their long-term goals and capacity for sustained homeownership.

This type of marketing content delivery also develops customer trust. When coverage is about more than just the cost, customers will be more satisfied and are more likely to remain policyholders.

3. Automate underwriting processes so that risk literacy doesn’t take a back seat

It’s difficult to ask risk professionals to communicate more with other departments unless more administrative tasks are taken off their plates. Thus, technologies that automate underwriting and claims workflows increase these professionals’ bandwidth for spreading risk literacy.

Automating underwriting processes that do not require human thoughtfulness gives professionals more time to curate risk insights for other business functions (see first point above).

Cotality’s UnderwritingCenter™ automates underwriting workflows through rule-based decision-making, identifying property risk attributes so that humans can focus on more complex risk analysis. Without more tedious projects on their shoulders, underwriters have more capacity to communicate the not-so-obvious risk findings to customer facing teams, who can then translate these insights to customers as risk literacy.

UnderwritingCenter™ also gives time back to underwriters by enabling virtual inspections. By minimizing time spent on job sites, it preserves brainpower for more strategic, creative communication.

Expanding the insurance mission to include risk literacy

With the right resources and strategic game plan, insurers can become reliable brokers of risk literacy. Risk knowledge is power, and is a must for building more resilient, insurable communities everywhere.

The precedent set by insurers can have both wide and long-lasting benefits. Once insurance companies maximize their opportunities for spreading risk literacy across insurance workflows, the mortgage and real estate industries could soon realize how important it is to introduce risk literacy earlier in the homebuying process.

Through risk literacy, insurers can take measured steps to preserving the American Dream of homeownership.

© 2025 Cotality. All rights reserved. While all of the content and information is believed to be accurate, it is provided by Cotality “as is” with no guarantee, representation, or warranty, express or implied, of any kind including but not limited to as to the merchantability, non-infringement of intellectual property rights, completeness, accuracy, applicability, or fitness, in connection with the content or information or products and Cotality assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever for the content or information or products or any reliance thereon. Cotality™, the Cotality logo, Intelligence beyond bounds™, and UnderwritingCenter™ are the trademarks of CoreLogic, Inc. d/b/a Cotality or its affiliates or subsidiaries.

Topics
Catastrophe
Carriers
Homeowners