Proposed Project for the MSU Industrial Math Students

Problem: Rating Value of PPC for Mobilehome

Background

Foremost is the leading insurer of manufactured homes in the country. We were the first company to write insurance specifically for mobile homes. Today, we insure all kinds of mobile and manufactured homes including older and newer mobile homes, homes in parks and on private property, seasonal and year-round homes, rental or commercial and single or multi-sectional units.

This project involves exploring a new rating factor for setting premiums for our owner-occupied mobile home book of business. Currently, we set rates based on the primary rating factors of age of insured, in or out of park and age of home. It has long been speculated the fire public protection class (PPC) rating as provided by the Insurance Services Office (ISO) may provide additional insight into rating our owner-occupied book of business.

Proposed Work Effort

The proposed work effort is very straight forward and manageable as a project in a semester-long course. The project would involve taking a file of five to ten years of policy information for our owner-occupied book of business in the state of Kentucky. Programming, preferably in SAS, would need to be completed to attach the PPC code to each policy. Due to license agreements, the actual attachment of PPC for each policy would need to be done on-site at Foremost. Due to address information for our mobile home book, it is anticipated there will be a large percentage of the homes for which the PPC cannot be determined. Classification of the types of errors encountered and/or development of a manual work-around may be necessary.

After attachment of the PPC to each policy, the personal identifiers of the policy (address) will be stripped from the file. At this point, claim information would be merged. The file would then be ready for analysis by the students with the ultimate goal of a determination of whether PPC should be used in rating our owner-occupied book of business.

Kentucky was selected as a trial state because of its historical fire issue.

Top of Page