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Comment by steelframe | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure the degree to which insurance companies are legally allowed to share information such as aerial photographs with each other.

When I worked at Google I knew a developer who was building a prototype service similar to Google Flights, except for auto and home insurance. I don't think that product ever shipped.

The dev on that team told me that a key thing they learned while doing the analysis is that the optimal strategy with auto and home insurance is to automatically switch providers whenever it's time to renew.

It could be because your current company has collected things about you that they aren't allowed to share with other insurance companies.

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I think the most common reason is that insurance companies try to attract new customers with lower rates / discounts and welcome gifts. Switching every year means a new insurance company spends their acquisition money on you every year.

Yeah, people like to think there’s all kinds of grand conspiracies out there when it comes to insurance companies. But they’re all actually very, very boring. All of these pricing algorithms are filed with the DOI, and are public. There is nothing crazy in them. The reason prices to go up at renewal is because that’s just the optimal economics of insurance companies. Get you in at a competitive new business rate and then increase rates at renewal to offset the losses that new business policies incur.

The product the OP is talking about made quite a buzz in the business when it was first released (I do think it came out for a while). It was a price comparison tool, and the reason it failed was because it was hard to get the big brand names on board. The big brand names didn’t want to compete on price alone, because they spent so much money on their brand. They already had a ton of customers coming straight to their website.

Sorry for any formatting or spelling issues here, I’m using voice to text.

> But they’re all actually very, very boring.

In fact they're actuarially very, very boring!

It's not to always switch, but to re-quote all competitors. Most insurance competition plays out on two factors:

- What companies the customer quotes - What amounts they are offered

You should always quote competitors because stuff changes and there are sign-on discounts offered as well.

https://www.comparethemarket.com/ is the best known comparison site for insurance in the UK.

Is there not an equivalent in the USA?

Each state has its own market.

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