NEW YORK—Verisk's Property Claim Services (PCS) unit hasincreased its insured-loss estimate from Superstorm Sandy to $18.75billion, with a large majority of losses felt in New York and NewJersey.

Speaking at the Extreme Weather Insurance Risk ManagementCongress organized by American Business Conferences on Jan. 23,Alex Korb of Verisk Analytics says about $16 billion in insuredlosses can be traced to New York and New Jersey—about $9.6 billion from the Empire State and about $6.3 billion from theGarden State.

The estimate of insured losses includes personal and commercialproperty as well as personal and commercial auto, says Korb, amanager at Verisk who focuses on corporate development and theinsurance-linked securities marketplace.

According to its latest data, Verisk has dismissed the notionthat Connecticut should be grouped among states with the highestinsured loss from the late October storm. Instead, Pennsylvaniawith its $700,000 million in insured losses and Maryland with$400,000 million in insured losses can now officially be mentionedamong the unfortunate leaders in insured losses.

PCS’ previous estimated insured-loss tally from Sandy was$11 billion, but it said the figure was likely to rise.

Catastrophe risk modeling firms have come in with estimates ashigh as $25 billion—but these estimates take into otherconsiderations, such as business interruption and “leakage”—or thepayment of flood losses on policies that actually do not cover theperil.

Independent reinsurance-brokerage firm Holborn says insuredlosses from Sandy could reach $30 billion.

The conference Jan. 23 focused on quantifying and managingnon-modeled catastrophes. If the estimate from PCS is accurate, itwould indeed seem as if the models had a hard time assessing Sandy,since modeler Eqecat released an estimate of $20 billion—not farfrom PCS’ property-only, insured-loss estimate.

Even the highest predicted insured-loss tally of up to $25billion from modeler Risk Management Solutions isn’t far from themark set by PCS. Modeler AIR Worldwide released an estimated rangeof losses of between $16 billion and $22 billion.

Returning to the losses in New York and New Jersey, Korb saysaround half—about $8.1 billion—are commercial property losses.About $5.2 billion are said to come from personal property, with$2.6 billion attributed to auto losses.

He says Sandy generated about 1.5 million claims from allaffected states, with 1.1 million coming from New York and NewJersey.

Jason Taylor, director of strategic sales for Xactware, saysSandy “is still an event for claims.” He warned the figures werepreliminary, but the firm—which provides claims-related software toclaims and underwriting professionals—has 500,000 claims in itssystem.

Surprisingly, he says, “demand surge is not as severe” as it hasbeen after some storms of recent history probably because ofadvanced notice and preparations taken prior to landfall.

“Labor is driving demand surge—the availability of materials isnot affecting demand,” Taylor says. Big-box construction suppliersbrought in materials to ready for the demand, he theorizes.