Ecopia AI Enhances Building-Based Geocoding with Flood Zone & Change Detection Insights

August 19, 2024 – Toronto – Today, Ecopia AI (Ecopia) announces the launch of new functionality for the Building-Based Geocoding API, providing change detection and FEMA flood zone information for every property queried. This additional data delivers a new level of detail for property intelligence analytics and risk assessment in the property and casualty (P&C) insurance industry, unlocking deeper insights for underwriting, claims, reinsurance, and more.

The new functionality expands on Ecopia’s market-leading Building-Based Geocoding solution. Created using the first and only complete map of buildings in the United States, Building-Based Geocoding associates 270M+ primary and secondary addresses with 176M+ building footprints, enabling end users to accurately locate individual structures and parcels of land on Earth’s surface. 

Users of the Building-Based Geocoding API can either query an address and receive high-precision rooftop-level latitude and longitude coordinates, a parcel ID, and building footprint data, or the reverse, providing flexibility in how the data is deployed. Addresses, buildings, and parcels are delivered with unique identifiers to accurately reflect complex property relationships and facilitate stronger master data management. Independent validation of Ecopia’s building-based approach to geocoding found it to be 97% accurate, while other popular solutions powered by parcel centroids or street segments are only 58% accurate.

With this launch, users will now receive two additional attributes about each building queried. A new field noting whether or not the building footprint has been modified in some way in the past year will help users factor real-world changes into their property analytics, while another field containing the FEMA flood zone classification will provide instant insight into the property’s risk profile.

The addition of these new features reflects several trends impacting the P&C insurance industry. Many carriers struggle to keep property databases up-to-date with a rapidly changing world, and instead are forced to make critical decisions with stale information. From 2023 to 2024 alone, 2M buildings in the US were modified, while 5M were demolished and 6.2M were created. Ecopia’s unique approach to geocoding, fueled by the company’s access to the freshest high-resolution geospatial imagery available, enables Building-Based Geocoding to be updated each year and reflect these dynamic property changes. Ecopia’s geocoded building footprints now include attribution noting its change status so carriers can not only maintain an up-to-date property database, but also understand how that database has changed year over year without manual analysis of individual buildings.

Similarly, P&C insurance carriers are grappling with how to adapt their strategies as flooding increases in intensity and frequency across the US. With this release, each geocoded building footprint is now appended with the code for the FEMA flood zone it falls within geographically. These alphanumeric values represent classifications established by FEMA to distinguish the flood risk of different areas. For example, ‘zone A’ indicates an area with a 1% annual chance of flooding and a 26% chance of flooding over the life of a 30‐year mortgage. Traditionally, insurers had to overlay geocodes and building footprints with FEMA flood zone maps and perform complex geospatial processing to understand the flood risk associated with the property. Thanks to the addition of pre-appended flood zone classifications to Ecopia’s Building-Based Geocoding, insurers can now instantly recognize individual property flood risk to power risk assessment models, inform underwriting, drive reinsurance strategy, and more. 

Building-Based Geocoding is currently used by top US P&C carriers, global reinsurers, and many other insurance firms and insurtechs of varying sizes. This foundational data, derived annually from high-resolution geospatial imagery by Ecopia’s AI-based mapping systems, provides unprecedented insight for a wide range of property analytics use cases, including policy pricing, claims management, risk modeling, imagery analysis, replacement cost estimation, and more. Ecopia’s innovation in the space has led to the company being named to the prestigious Insurtech100 list twice, in addition to a host of other awards in the geospatial industry.

“We are excited to launch this new functionality for our Building-Based Geocoding API,” said Matt Schmidt, Associate at Ecopia AI. “Change detection and flood risk are among the most pressing issues facing the insurance industry today, and we are proud to leverage our AI-based mapping systems to provide these building-level insights to our customers and unlock new opportunities for innovation and resilience in our dynamically changing world.”

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About Ecopia AI 
Ecopia is on a mission to create a digital twin of the Earth. We leverage artificial intelligence to convert high-resolution imagery into high-definition (HD) vector maps. These maps form a digital representation of reality and are embedded into decision-making applications, offering unique insight at scale. Ecopia’s HD vector maps are leveraged for hundreds of commercial and government applications across over 100 countries around the world.