Your clients are underinsured (and your advice is NOT the problem)

Here's a number that should keep every agent up at night: roughly 60% of American homeowners are underinsured.

That's not a guess. The Insurance Information Institute reports that structural replacement costs have climbed nearly 30% over the past five years. The BLS says building materials were up another 3.5% in 2025 alone. And a University of Colorado study of nearly 5,000 policyholders affected by the Marshall Fire found they were underinsured by an average of $139,000.

Meanwhile, most policies have inflation guard clauses that bump coverage 2–4% a year. When actual construction costs are running 8–12% in some markets, the gap widens every single renewal cycle.

This matters for agents because of one word: coinsurance. If a client's dwelling coverage falls below 80% of true replacement cost, the payout gets reduced proportionally, even on partial losses.

The fix isn't complicated: run a fresh replacement cost estimate at every renewal, not just when the policy is first written.

Agents know the source data is stale. They're correcting it on the fly, in between systems, because there's no upstream process catching it for them.

We see this at Gaya every day. When agents supercopy data from a prior policy or dec page, a lot of them go back into the clipboard to manually update the replacement cost before superpasting into the new carrier portal. Some supercopy from one source, then supercopy again from a more recent one to pull in updated values.

Underinsurance isn't a coverage problem. It's a workflow problem.