Elevation Certificates | What You Need to Know
Anywhere it can rain, it can flood. While flood insurance may be exciting to insurance agents, your clients might disagree. Regardless, flooding and the harm it causes the average American are why FEMA and its National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) are adamant about supporting insurance agents. The more your clients understand flood risk, the better armed they are to take action to protect their lives against flooding.
Among other support efforts, the NFIP leads campaigns intended to teach agents and their clients about the risk of flooding. And one of the most frequently asked questions is about elevation certificates (EC). Your clients may misunderstand what elevation certificates are, what they do and how they work, so here’s a simple way of explaining them.
Elevation certificates are a technical tool. They exist to explain key specifics about an individual property’s elevation. These specifics can include:
- Understanding the elevation of a building;
- How waters might rise on the property; or
- How water might flow in the event of a storm
Elevation certificates help state/local floodplain regulators enforce local building ordinances, and of course they help insurance agents determine what risk a home may have when writing policies ... All of this to help protect the home and its inhabitants.
So, what happens when your clients ask about elevation certificates? The answer is simple; tell them that having up-to-date ECs can help them understand their risk of flooding, which in turn may mean lower flood insurance premiums.
To learn more, or to find tools, resources, fact sheets and publications, visit:
https://www.agents.floodsmart.gov/
