Your nonrenewal blames a wildfire risk score. Now what?

What is a wildfire risk score, and who calculates it?

It's a number attached to your parcel — and here's the part that surprises people: your insurance company usually didn't calculate it. Carriers typically buy these scores from data vendors. Verisk sells one called FireLine, which examines property-specific factors like vegetative fuels, terrain and slope, and road access. Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) sells a competing wildfire risk score. First Street, a climate-risk modeler, publishes a consumer-facing version called Fire Factor. Each model looks at roughly the same ingredients — what can burn around you, how steep the ground is, how hard it is for a fire crew to reach you — and each weighs them differently. The same house can look fine in one model and alarming in another. Keep that in mind; it matters later.

How do insurance companies actually use the score?

Typically as a gate. Many carriers set score thresholds: below the line you're quoted normally, in the middle you may pay a surcharge or face brush-clearance requirements, above the line the system declines before a human ever looks. In a tight market, some carriers also run the score against their existing book at renewal — which is how people with twenty claim-free years get nonrenewal letters. The score is mostly about the land, not you: your payment history and clean record usually aren't the variables. Cold comfort, but with a useful flip side — one carrier's score cutoff is not the whole market's opinion, because they're not all using the same model or the same line.

How do you see your own score?

The honest answer: the exact number your carrier used is often hard to get. Carriers aren't generally in the habit of handing over the vendor score itself — though your nonrenewal notice must state the reason, and your agent can often find out what's driving a decline. What you can see free is First Street's Fire Factor: Redfin displays it on property listings, and First Street publishes its methodology. Treat it as a proxy, not the answer — it's a different model from the ones most underwriters buy — but it tells you quickly whether your address screens as a wildfire property at all.

Can you dispute a score that's wrong or outdated?

Sometimes, and it's worth trying — because these models lean on aerial imagery and parcel data that can lag reality by years. If the previous owner's overgrown brush got cleared, or the county's parcel data has your lot wrong, the model may still be scoring a property that no longer exists. The dispute kit is simple: dated photos of all four sides of the house and the hundred feet around it, receipts for brush clearing or roof work, and a request — through your agent — for a re-inspection, an exception, or an underwriting review with the photos attached. One more angle: if your notice cites specific property conditions (brush against the house, say), Arizona law generally gives you 30 days to correct them and keep your coverage — though a decision framed purely as a business or risk-appetite call typically doesn't trigger that right. Realistic expectations: nobody can promise the same carrier reverses itself. What the photo file changes more often is which other market says yes.

Does clearing defensible space actually change anything?

Two different questions hide in there. Does it change whether your house survives a fire? Genuinely yes — NFPA's research-based guidance treats the first five feet around the house as the zone that matters most, because that's where wind-blown embers ignite homes: a non-combustible zone at 0–5 feet, thinned vegetation at 5–30 feet, spaced-out fuels from 30–100 feet. Does it change your insurance? Increasingly, but unevenly. Some models now assess structure hardening and defensible space at the property level, some carriers give credits for recognized programs like Firewise USA (NFPA's neighborhood-level program), and some markets will write a mitigated home they'd otherwise decline. But no certificate obligates any carrier to take you back. Our honest advice: do the mitigation because it protects the house, document it because documentation is what moves underwriters — and let the discount be the bonus, not the plan.

What if no carrier will write the house at all?

First, know what Arizona doesn't have: unlike California, there's no FAIR plan — no state-backed insurer of last resort. In practice that means the path runs through the regular market and, when that fails, the surplus-lines market, where specialty insurers write the risks standard carriers won't. That placement work is exactly what an independent agency exists for — here's the full guide for when everyone seems to be saying no. Serial declines are a market condition, not a verdict on your house.