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What Underwriters Need From a Property Statement of Values
The SOV is not paperwork. It is the submission.
A statement of values is the schedule of buildings, values, and building data that underwriters price a portfolio from. It is the first document an underwriter reads, the input every catastrophe model runs on, and the document a claim can revisit after a loss. This guide covers the fields underwriters commonly expect, why incomplete data stalls submissions, and how to prepare a carrier-ready schedule.
Part of the 4J commercial property portfolio practice. Educational, not a policy interpretation.
What Is a Statement of Values?
A statement of values, or SOV, is a location-by-location schedule of everything a property program is being asked to insure: each building's address, values, construction, occupancy, protection, and exposure detail. Underwriters use it to price the risk, allocate capacity, and run catastrophe models. Because premiums, limits, and post-loss outcomes all trace back to it, the SOV is the single most consequential document in a property submission.
Two practical consequences follow. First, the quality of the SOV largely determines how seriously the market takes the account: underwriters triage submissions, and schedules with gaps go to the bottom of the stack. Second, the SOV interacts with policy provisions such as coinsurance, margin clauses, and agreed value, so understated numbers are not a pricing trick, they are a claim problem waiting for a loss.
The Carrier-Ready SOV: Commonly Requested Fields
Requirements vary by carrier, occupancy, and geography, so treat this as the commonly requested core rather than a universal rule. A schedule that carries these fields, current and complete for every location, is ready for most property submissions.
- Full property address for every location
- Building value, on a stated valuation basis
- Business personal property and contents value
- Business income or rental value, with method noted
- Square footage per building
- Year built
- Construction class and materials
- Occupancy, and tenant mix where relevant
- Number of stories and number of units
- Protection: sprinklers, alarms, hydrants, responding department
- Roof age, covering, and replacement or update year
- Electrical updates: year and scope
- Plumbing updates: year and scope
- HVAC updates: year and scope
- Flood zone determination per location
- Distance to coast, where wind or named storm applies
- Prior losses at the location, with dates and causes
- Valuation method: replacement cost or actual cash value
- Catastrophe characteristics: wind, hail, flood, quake notes
- Ownership entity and any lender interest per location
The Carrier-Ready SOV Checklist
We maintain this list as a working checklist, with the field definitions and the common mistakes for each entry. Request a Property Portfolio Readiness Review and the checklist comes back with your written findings, mapped against your actual schedule.
COPE: The Four Questions Behind Every Field
Most SOV columns exist to answer one of four underwriting questions, known as COPE: what is the building made of, how is it used, how is it protected, and what is around it. A schedule organized with COPE in mind tends to be complete; one built from whatever the last broker requested tends not to be.
Construction
Construction class, materials, year built, stories, square footage, and the roof. Determines how a building burns, how it withstands wind, and what it costs to rebuild.
Occupancy
What happens inside: habitational, office, retail, industrial, cold storage. Occupancy drives frequency patterns and carrier appetite more than owners expect.
Protection
Sprinklers and their adequacy, alarms, hydrants, distance to the responding fire department, and protection class. Protection detail separates otherwise identical buildings.
Exposure
What surrounds the building and what nature can do to it: neighboring occupancies, wildfire fuel, flood zone, wind and hail territory, distance to coast.
Secondary characteristics extend COPE for catastrophe modeling: roof geometry and anchoring, cladding, glass area, foundation type. On wind and hail exposed schedules, documented secondary detail is frequently the difference between a modeled estimate and a punitive default assumption.
Why Incomplete Property Data Delays or Kills Submissions
Underwriters decline or ignore more submissions than they price. When a schedule arrives with unknown roof ages, blank construction fields, or values that do not reconcile with square footage, the underwriter has three options: chase the missing data, assume the worst, or move to the next account in the queue. None of those outcomes helps the insured.
- Blanks read as bad news. An unknown roof age is treated as an old roof. An unknown sprinkler status is treated as unsprinklered. Defaults are never in the insured's favor.
- Inconsistencies poison credibility. A building valued at a fraction of its square-footage norm makes every other number on the schedule suspect.
- Chasing data burns the renewal clock. Every round trip for missing fields consumes days the renewal timeline does not have.
- Models punish missing detail. Catastrophe models fill gaps with conservative assumptions, which flows straight into the technical price.
- Late data means fewer markets. The submission that goes out clean on day one reaches more underwriters than the one still being corrected three weeks in.
The fix is unglamorous and effective: close the gaps before marketing. That is the core of the readiness review.
Replacement Cost Is Not Market Value
The most common valuation error on an SOV is reporting what a building would sell for, or what it is carried at on the books, instead of what it would cost to rebuild. Market value includes land and reflects income and location; replacement cost is construction cost for like kind and quality, and it is the basis property insurance generally works from.
The two numbers can diverge in either direction. A well-located older building may sell for far more than its rebuild cost; a purpose-built facility in a soft market may sell for far less. Purchase price, appraisal for lending, tax value, and book value each answer a different question, and none of them answers the underwriter's question. When values on a schedule trace back to one of those sources, valuation review belongs at the top of the renewal preparation list, before coinsurance or a margin clause turns the discrepancy into a claim shortfall.
Find the gaps before an underwriter does.
Send us your current SOV, in whatever state it is in, and get a written field-by-field read: what is complete, what is missing, which values look inconsistent, and what to fix first against your renewal date. No cost, no obligation, no broker of record change.
Statement of Values FAQ
What format should a statement of values be in?
A spreadsheet, almost always. Underwriters and modeling tools work from structured data, so an SOV maintained in Excel or CSV, one row per location with consistent column headings, is far more usable than a PDF or a narrative document. If your current schedule lives in a PDF, converting it to a spreadsheet is usually the first preparation step.
How often should SOV values be updated?
At minimum, every renewal, and any time the portfolio changes: acquisitions, dispositions, major renovations, roof replacements, or occupancy changes. Values rolled forward unchanged for several years are one of the first things an underwriter notices, because construction costs move and stale values usually mean underinsurance.
What are secondary characteristics on an SOV?
Detail beyond the basic COPE fields: roof geometry and covering, roof anchoring, wall cladding, glass area, foundation type, and similar attributes that catastrophe models use to differentiate buildings. They matter most for wind and hail exposed schedules, where two buildings with identical primary data can model very differently based on secondary detail.
Does reporting a value on the SOV commit us to that value?
The SOV is a representation to underwriters, and it interacts with policy provisions such as coinsurance, margin clauses, and agreed value. Reported values that turn out to be materially understated can reduce a claim payment. That is why valuation discipline matters more than optimistic numbers: the schedule should reflect what the buildings would actually cost to replace.
Who is responsible for preparing the SOV?
The insured owns the data: only the owner or operator knows the buildings, the updates, and the income. A broker's job is to define the fields, test the values for consistency, flag the gaps, and assemble the schedule into a submission underwriters can work. Third-party valuation or appraisal can support specific locations where the numbers are uncertain.
Educational content describing common market practice. Carrier requirements vary, and nothing here is a universal underwriting rule, a policy interpretation, or a guarantee of any outcome. Your policy wording and your carrier's requirements control. Related definitions live in the property and portfolio glossary.
Your renewal clock is already running.
Ninety days goes quickly when a schedule needs work. Start with the data.