November 2022. By Cassy Aoyagi: Angelenos have an added incentive to make our homes Safer from Wildfire – California now mandates our insurance companies provide discounts for taking action. What a gift! As big as that gift is, it’s not even the full shebang…
The new law also mandates that insurance companies reveal a property’s score and give owners an opportunity to appeal their assessment.
Whether you want to angle for a discount or defend your defensive actions, we have an abundance of resources to help you prepare to earn the best possible score and rate:
Fire Defensive Landscape Maintenance
When it comes to your landscape, the actions most in line with those defined by Safer from Wildfire relate to fire defensive maintenance practices. You might be surprised how incredible simple these life saving, discount earning tasks are!
Fire Defensive Landscape Qualities
If you’ve been alerted to a potential rate hike or loss of insurance, landscape maintenance is still a great place to start. A landscape renovation that references the distinct vulnerabilities of your home, as I showcase in our tours, will go further toward defending both your rate and your home.
While we’ve all been trained to think of taming nature as the best way to protect ourselves, the best way to become safer from wildfire is to think home first. It’s also the best way to earn insurance discounts!
Home and Neighboring Structures
Being safer from wildfire means making the most flammable objects in the wild (our homes) less receptive to fire. The state’s framework recognizes this by placing home hardening ahead of landscaping actions. This may not be as onerous as you envision. While maintenance of the spaces nearest your home can low-hanging fruit, many high-impact home upgrades have a surprisingly low relative cost.
With the state gifting wildland urban interface dwellers discounts for the holidays, my hope is we can start giving ourselves and LA the safety we all deserve.