A wildfire score decline is one company’s model saying it doesn’t want the risk at any price it’s willing to file. It isn’t a finding about your house, and the next company may well answer differently. The useful response is to find out what the decision was built on, correct anything factually wrong, document mitigation you’ve already done, and go to other companies properly instead of jumping straight to the backstop.
Nobody can honestly promise you that any of that produces an approval. Eligibility varies by company, by model and by address. What it does is change the facts in front of the underwriter, and that’s the only part of this you control.
What a wildfire score actually is
Companies don’t usually turn a house down because somebody looked at a map and decided the area feels risky. They turn it down because a model produced a number, and the number fell outside the band they’ll write.
Those models are proprietary. Some are built in house. Most are licensed from vendors. They generally combine some mix of the following:
- Fuels. Vegetation type, density and continuity around the structure, including the first few feet against the walls.
- Terrain. Slope, aspect and position on the hill. Fire moves faster uphill, and a home at the top of a chute is a different risk than one on flat ground a quarter mile away.
- Weather and fire behavior history. Prevailing wind patterns, historical fire perimeters, and modeled spread under bad conditions.
- Access and egress. Road width, driveway length and grade, turnaround, bridges and single point access.
- Suppression capability. Responding department, distance, and available water. This overlaps heavily with the questions in homes with no fire hydrant.
- Structure characteristics. Roof assembly, vents, eaves, siding, decks and windows, where the model has data on them.
- Imagery. Aerial or satellite imagery of the parcel, sometimes recent, sometimes several years old.
Two things follow from that list. The same address can score acceptably at one company and badly at another, because the weightings differ. And several of those inputs are facts about your specific parcel that can be measured wrong.
Where the law helps, and where it does not
This gets misreported constantly, so here’s the part that matters to a decline, stated plainly. What follows is information about the law, not legal advice.
Oregon’s ORS 742.278 restricts one input, a map published by an Oregon state agency, and it names three actions: cancelling, declining to renew, and increasing a premium. By its own words it does not reach declination of a new application. That distinction is the whole game. If you were turned down on a new application rather than nonrenewed, the statute won’t help you, and neither will any argument built on it. It also never reached a company’s own model or a licensed vendor model, which is what produced your number.
Washington and Idaho have no equivalent restriction. If you own in more than one of these states, don’t assume the Oregon framing travels with you. Multi state ownership has its own wrinkles, covered under multi home multi state insurance.
Oregon law does include a notice provision entitling a homeowner to property specific information about a wildfire risk determination. Ask your agent to request it in writing. Knowing which characteristics drove the score is the difference between guessing at mitigation and aiming it, and it’s the most useful thing you can do in the first week after a decline.
The full Oregon statutory picture, including SB 83’s repeal of the statewide map and what the Division of Financial Regulation has said about proprietary models since, is set out in placing a high value Oregon home with a wildfire score. What follows here is what to do once an answer has already come back no.
Documentation that can change an answer
Before you spend money on brush removal, spend an afternoon on facts. These are the items we most often find wrong.
The parcel boundary and the structure location. Models sometimes place the structure at the center of a large parcel rather than at the house. On acreage that can put your home in the middle of timber when it actually sits on a cleared bench.
Stale imagery. If the model is reading aerial imagery from before you cleared, thinned or rebuilt, it’s scoring a property that no longer exists. Dated photographs with GPS metadata, plus a current survey or site plan, are the counterweight.
The responding fire district. Districts change boundaries, add stations and change staffing. Name the wrong department and the suppression input comes out wrong. Call the district and get the current answer in writing, including the protection class, the road mile distance, and what water supply exists.
Roof and vent assemblies. If the roof was replaced with a Class A assembly and the record says wood shake, that’s an error rather than a judgment call. Invoices, product specs and permit records fix it. The rest of the roof picture is in roof requirements for high value homes.
Prior mitigation you already paid for. Fuel breaks, thinning, ember resistant vents, enclosed eaves, deck replacement, water storage. Undocumented, none of it exists as far as an underwriter is concerned.
Mitigation, aimed rather than scattered
There’s a rough hierarchy, and most people work it backwards. The cheapest and highest value work is the first few feet against the structure, then the roof assembly, then vents and eaves, before anything involving a contractor and a chainsaw on the wider acreage. The full order, with what each item addresses, is in placing a high value Oregon home with a wildfire score.
What’s specific to a decline is the sequencing. Don’t start work until you have the property specific determination described above. The point is to fix what the model actually read, rather than to spend on whatever is most visible from the road. Targeted work against a named finding moves an underwriter. General tidying doesn’t.
One caution. Oregon’s statewide defensible space mandate was repealed with SB 83 and replaced with a model code that local governments may adopt voluntarily. Local requirements in some Idaho jurisdictions are stricter than the state picture suggests. Check what applies where the house actually sits, not what applies statewide.
The inspection
Wildfire cases almost always draw an inspection, and often a wildfire specific one on top of a general property inspection. Expect photographs of the approach, the driveway, the structure from all sides, the roof, the eaves and vents, the deck, and the vegetation at several distances out.
Prepare the way you would for any underwriting visit, using our inspection checklist. The addition for a wildfire case is having the mitigation documentation physically there. Invoices, before and after photographs, the fire district letter, and any community program records. An inspector who can photograph the paperwork alongside the property sends back something stronger than a note saying the owner said work was done.
Alternative markets, in the right order
Run these in sequence, rather than all at once in a panic.
Other standard companies. One decline is one model’s output. What companies have decided to write differs a lot, and so do the models behind those decisions. This is the step people skip.
Specialty high value programs. Several programs are built for larger homes in exposed areas, and they tend to underwrite the individual property more than the territory. They also tend to want more inspection and more mitigation.
Surplus lines. Non admitted companies can write houses the admitted market turns down, with more flexible terms and different pricing. The trade offs are real. Forms vary, there’s generally no state guaranty fund behind the policy, and the coverage needs reading rather than assuming.
The state residual market. Oregon has a FAIR Plan. It’s a fire backstop with narrower coverage, usually paired with a separate policy to cover what it leaves out. The Oregon path is covered in more depth in Oregon wildfire home insurance options.
If you’re dealing with a nonrenewal rather than a turndown on a new application, the sequence and the notice rules differ. That’s covered under high value home nonrenewal.
Questions worth asking
- What exactly was the stated reason, and is it a score, a map, a model or an inspection finding?
- Which specific property characteristics drove it, and can I have that in writing?
- Is the structure location on record the actual house, or the middle of the parcel?
- How old is the imagery the model used?
- Which responding fire district does the record show, and does it match reality?
- If I complete specific mitigation, will this company look again, and on what timeline?
- Which companies haven’t seen this house yet?
Where this fits
A wildfire decline is a starting point rather than a verdict on a house. Correct the facts, document the work, find out which legal restriction actually applies in your state, and then go to companies in an order that makes sense.
Full detail on how we approach these houses is on our wildfire home insurance page.
If you have a decline letter in hand, bring it to a coverage review and we’ll start by reading what it actually says.