Marshall and Swift/Boeckh (MSB), a provider of building costdata and estimating technology to the property insurance industry,introduces MSB InterChange, an online database of propertycharacteristics data. The database is updated continuously withdata drawn from real-estate, financial, insurance, and remodelingactivity across the United States. Agents and underwriters who haveaccess to InterChange's insurance-ready data via MSB's homevaluation applications gain greater efficiency and accuracy at thepoint of sale when creating preliminary insurance-to-valuecalculations, quoting, and binding homeowners coverage.

Peter M. Wells, president of MSB, explains the challenge ofincorporating third-party building characteristics as part ofcalculating replacement cost values traditionally has been thequestionable reliability of this information. MSB believes it isnecessary to develop a viable scoring process as part of filteringinformation before that information is shared with insurers.

"Too often, ordinary public record data has been accepted withno consideration toward validation processes that allow better useof third-party input," says Wells. "Our InterChange initiative isnot just to source any data but rather apply scoring metrics beforeinsurance-ready building characteristic data is released."

The database of insurance-ready home data is available throughMSB's home valuation application, Residential Component Technology,hosted on MSB Express, a secure Web-based platform. InterChangeprepopulates data fields in RCT with current, continuously updatedhome characteristic data into the appropriate data fields, reducingphone time and data errors. InterChange home characteristic dataalso is available in a database form to carriers that participatein a reciprocal data exchange.