Some news from the US market for you;
ZestyAI, the Risk Decision Platform for the insurance industry, has announced that Z-WATER™, its property-level model for non-weather water risk, has been accepted for use in carrier rate and rule filings in more than 20 states nationwide. Nevada, Oregon, Ohio, South Carolina, and Oklahoma are among the model’s recent state approvals.
Non-weather water has become the fourth-costliest peril in homeowners insurance, driving more than $15 billion in annual losses across more than one million claims. Claim severity has also risen 80%, compounding the financial impact for insurers as even routine water incidents become increasingly costly. Unlike weather catastrophes, these losses often begin with ordinary failures inside the home — a burst pipe, plumbing deterioration, appliance failure, or hidden leak — but can result in significant damage before they are detected.
Despite the scale of the problem, insurers have historically had limited ways to distinguish which individual properties are most susceptible to water losses. Traditional approaches often rely on broad geographic territories, property age, and other proxies that can overlook meaningful differences between otherwise similar homes.
Z-WATER addresses that gap by evaluating risk at the individual-property level. Trained and validated using insurer loss data, the model uses computer vision to read aerial imagery and evaluates how property characteristics, permitting history, localized climatology, and infrastructure context interact to drive both the frequency and severity of non-weather water claims. Z-WATER delivers 18x risk segmentation lift compared with traditional territory- and age-based approaches, giving insurers a far sharper read on risk across their portfolios.
“Non-weather water losses place real pressure on carriers’ books, but they’re also highly preventable when you understand where the risks actually lie,” said Bryan Rehor, Senior Director of Regulatory and Government Affairs at ZestyAI. “The growing regulatory acceptance of Z-WATER reflects a broader shift toward models that can identify meaningful differences in risk from one home to the next while providing the transparency regulators expect.”
The expansion of Z-WATER builds on ZestyAI’s broader regulatory momentum. Across its models for wildfire, hail, wind, severe convective storm, non-weather water, and property and roof intelligence, ZestyAI has secured more than 200 regulatory approvals nationwide.
As insurers confront rising property loss costs, carrier adoption and regulatory acceptance of property-specific risk models are advancing in parallel, giving insurers new ways to move beyond broad geographic and age-based proxies and more accurately reflect the risk of individual properties.
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