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UK Rebuild / Reinstatement
What is Rebuild cost?
The Rebuild Cost, or Sum Insured or Total Insured Value of a property, all essentially describe the same thing, namely the total replacement cost of a property should it be destroyed, excluding land or contents. Here we use Rebuild Cost to cover all these terms.
What is Addresscloud’s rebuild cost service?
We provide, via our API, a current and realistic minimum cost estimate to rebuild a new property of a similar use, size and location for both residential and commercial properties across GB; all you need to provide is the address.
How is it provided?
We provide our rebuild cost via our API.
How do you create your rebuild cost?
Our rebuild cost is made up of 2 main components:
- 1. Property data, e.g., location, age, style, use, floor area etc
- 2. Material costs, cost per sqm for different style and type of properties
How do you collect your material costs?
We have partnered with two leading UK companies who supply to the insurance and construction sectors detailed cost models and survey reports. Between them they have over 50 years of professional experience at costing and appraisal work.
How often are your cost models updated?
Generally, we update our cost models on a quarterly basis, however during the current inflationary period we will be updating these on a monthly basis.
Where do you get your property data from?
Addresscloud has key partnership with leading home warranty and property sales companies, they provide a wealth of property data and these partners alongside authoritative government open data sources have given us the ability to create a very unique and comprehensive property data base with over 35 different attributes for 30m+ properties across the UK. Find out more here.
Is there a difference between your commercial and residential rebuild costs?
Our rebuild costs for both residential and commercial properties are commonly based on total floor area as this has a direct relationship with the cost of rebuilding the property. However, beyond that there are key differences, namely our residential model is largely driven by the age, type and style, whereas our commercial model is driven by property use, e.g. Office, Warehouse
What types of commercial use do you provide rebuild costs for?
Currently we have rebuild costs for over 100 different commercial property use types for example, offices, computer centres, shops, warehouses, factories, commercial units etc.
What property data do you account for in your rebuild cost?.
The key property data types that are included in our residential rebuild cost are:
- Style & Type
- Wall and Roof type
- Period built
- Floor count
- Footprint area
- Total floor area
- Property use
Do you include bathrooms or bedrooms as a factor in your rebuild calculations?
No, even though we do hold these data in our property database. We believe a more realistic rebuild calculation should be based on construction factors, e.g. floors, floor area and not the number of bedrooms in a property.
Listed buildings, do you provide rebuild costs for these?
No, where a property has a listed status in our database we have not calculate the rebuild cost.
Are there any limits on your rebuild cost?
We do not provide rebuild costs for listed buildings, nor do we account for barn conversions, timber construction properties, or architecturally designed properties
For residential properties we do not provide rebuild costs in excess of £1.5m; we believe above this value a surveyor is required to visit the property..
Are there any additional factors you consider?
Beyond the core property data, we also include factors to account for the following:
- Presence of basements
- Location, i.e., postcode
- Situation, e.g., city centre, suburban etc
- Conservation areas
- Size of building
- Number of floors
- Risk and contingency costs
- Legal costs
- Demolition and removal costs
Are there any factors you do not account for?
We do not include VAT in any of our calculations as we assume the rebuild cost is for the total destruction of the property and with new constructions VAT is not applicable on the construction components. Insurers should consider the addition of VAT to any costs where there is partial damage to the property.
How do you validate your rebuild cost?
The rebuild costs are validated in 3 ways, firstly the property data is checked by the third-party companies that supply us with their data, secondly our material costs providers validate against known prices and thirdly we bench mark our resulting rebuild costs against those gathered by field surveyors and other third party rebuild cost services.
When comparing our costs to other rebuild cost calculators we see a strong correlation in these values, though ours are slightly higher than their average cost, we believe this is a more realistic reflection of the increased cost of a single build than those based on high volume new build projects.
How accurate are your rebuild costs?
Accuracy for rebuild is always tricky as the rebuild cost is just an estimate, the true cost is never known until the actual property is fully rebuilt and those costs are rarely available in sufficient numbers to be a useful measure.
Validating such huge volumes of data from multiple sources, and having confidence in the cost being generated can also be a tricky task as there are many ways of generating a rebuild value, and each method will produce a different result.
However we do provide accuracy scores for each of our rebuild costs based on the quality and source of the input property and cost data, see the chart below (Excludes flats; A records are based on validated field survey, or measure data, B records are modelled at the building level from A records, C modelled at the postcode and D at the multi postcode level).
How do your rebuild costs compare to a surveyor?
An automated digital data approach that is national will not produce the same result as a surveyor, it is likely there will be differences in the property data, for example calculation of total floor area, and differences in the raw material cost model used. So, it so not be expected that the rebuild cost will be the same from two entirely different approaches. However, in recent tests for insurers across a portfolio of addresses the total rebuild cost difference between both Addresscloud’s automated values and those of a surveyor was less than 20%.
How quickly can I get a rebuild cost for my property?
In under 1 second. Our national rebuild cost service is delivered by our APIs and based on our extensive property database coupled with our cost model. This means we have the capability to deliver address level rebuild costs for property portfolios within minutes.