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From the claims side, evaluating contents for coinsurance calculations is always difficult. If they are destroyed by a total fire, forget it! Of course, the insured may unwittingly trigger a coinsurance penalty by claiming contents that far exceed the insured value. I would not try to stand on an average value of contents to calculate co-insurance. But, if I understand you correctly, you are looking for how to calculate these values for underwriting purposes. I would assume this is so you would know how to properly rate the risk.

As always, the first question has to be whether the contents are being insured at ACV or RCV. This would make a big difference in the scenario you outline in your post.

There are replacement vendors like National Vendor who might have some statistics that would help. I imagine they would share these figures with you for a fee. If you are not in the position to pay any sort of consulting fee, I believe that free advice would be worth the price (and not much more).

Thanks,

I'm not looking for freebie data, I'm searching for potential data sources.
Makes sense, at least after the 2nd beer, to check with claims gurus to see what you use when you're looking at a pile of rubble.

I wouldn't use benchmarks to set values, but I do think they're useful for flagging outliers for more in-depth analysis.
I've got one source that works off annual revenue, but that doesn't help me with government, schools, and others with no revenue.

On the commercial end the policyholder should be able to tell the value of their contents (equipment, fixtures, stock, cost of goods sold, etc) by their tax return information as a lot of it is used in depreciation schedules and/or deducted from sales. When we look at a pile of ashes, there is no benchmark that I'm aware of to estimate values of what the insured may have had before the fire. We have to rely on the inventory supplied by the insured and documented by tax information, inventory backup information and whatever other support data they may have in their possession. When I deal with any out of sight (all contents gone or completely destroyed) contents loss, I tell the insured that when completing the inventory forms to put down everything that would fall under that coverage that they had, and not pay attention to any limits of liability on the policy. I do explain that there is a limit that is the max the policy will pay, but that some tax laws allow for tax write-offs of certain casualty losses that are uninsured or not reimbursed. There may also be some assistance from government programs for certain uninsured losses. I request that they provide me with the total loss that they sustained w/o any consideration of limits involved. You would be amazed on how many people will supply inventory sheets with support documentation that show they were under insured for their loss, and in their own words/documentation they documented the fact.

On the personal lines end of it, I'd say you pretty much have to take the insured's requested amount of contents coverage at face value as absent an inspection I know of no benchmark to be used. In some cases the automatic 50,60% or 75% of the building limit is very adequate, and in some it is woefully low or high. Would be nice if agents addressed this with the insured, but I don't know as if that ever happens. Never has with me.