The use of these unmanned aerial vehicles has been adopted by Allstate, State Farm and other major property insurers.
Property insurance companies in Texas and Louisiana, such as Allstate and State Farm, are preparing to use their insurance drones to survey the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
This insurance technology is expected to have an important role in inspecting commercial and residential damage.
The insurance drones will first take to the air early this week, once the last of Hurricane Harvey makes its way out of the regions. If all goes well, the property insurance companies will be able to make faster progress in now that their claims adjusters have this technology to work with, when compared to the length of time the inspections took before they started using the drones.
While drone insurance technology is already being used quite regularly by a handful of large insurance companies, catastrophes such as this one show that it can provide significant benefit. On a typical day, adjusters may use drones to inspect a roof for a homeowners insurance claim. This helps to avoid having to climb up on a roof using a ladder.
The insurance drones can not only do this for adjusters, but they can also reach areas that would otherwise be impassable.
The drones could make it possible for adjusters to view structures and other parts of insured properties that remain unreachable due to damage. This can make the claims process both safer and faster.
Hurricane Harvey has devastated many roads and a significant amount of the infrastructure in the region remains unusable. However, by deploying a drone, the insurance companies can get past the closed roads and inspect the properties regardless. In fact, in some circumstances, several neighboring properties can be inspected at the same time, greatly reducing the length of time it would have taken to do so on the ground.
This could potentially encourage a larger number of business and homeowners insurance companies to start using their own drones for claims inspections. At the moment, only 20 percent of property insurers worldwide are using insurance drones. The main hope is that it will help to reduce the amount of time homeowners need to wait before they can move forward to the next step in their claims process.