The Insurance Shift Reshaping the 2026 Property Market

Insurance availability has become a constraint on the housing market.

That’s the central argument Ross Martin, VP of Risk Analytics at ZestyAI, makes in ATTOM’s newly released Q4 2025 Housing News Report—and it’s one that will increasingly shape affordability, underwriting, and buyer behavior heading into 2026.

Housing discussions still focus on mortgage rates and inventory. But in many markets—especially catastrophe-exposed ones—insurance is becoming a gate in the transaction. If a property can’t get insured, or coverage is uncertain, deals stall. And when insurance costs spike unexpectedly, affordability breaks even when the mortgage penciled out.

Ross’s point isn’t simply that insurance is getting more expensive. It’s that availability and predictability now matter as much as price—and the market would function better with clearer, property-level risk signals.

Today, homes in similar locations can carry meaningfully different risk based on factors like roof condition and materials, defensible space and vegetation management, yard and debris conditions, and documented improvements captured in permits or listing data. When those distinctions aren’t consistently reflected in underwriting or pricing, mitigation efforts go unrewarded—and higher-risk properties don’t get early, property-specific signals to improve.

For insurers, this lack of granularity creates real portfolio risk. When individual properties aren’t differentiated clearly enough, volatility increases, adverse selection becomes harder to avoid, and long-term participation in catastrophe-exposed markets becomes less sustainable. Property-level, mitigation-aware models help address this by improving segmentation and enabling insurers to stay in market with more confidence.

Recent advances in property-specific data and modeling now make this differentiation possible at scale. Insurers can assess dozens of attributes—including roof age and materials, defensible space, vegetation conditions, building permits, occupancy type, and hazard-specific science—to build a clearer view of a structure’s vulnerability. Just as importantly, these models can recognize mitigation actions—like roof replacements, defensible space creation, and debris removal—and incorporate them more consistently into underwriting and pricing.

When mitigation is visible and rewarded:

• Homeowners and investors gain more control over premiums
• Insurers can maintain more stable portfolios, even in high-risk regions
• Housing markets get clearer signals—making insurance availability and long-term cost less of a guessing game for buyers and lenders

Regulators are paying attention as well. In several states, regulators are examining how property-level data, mitigation, and modern risk modeling approaches can be incorporated more consistently into rate structures, with transparency as a common objective.

The takeaway is straightforward: insurance is shifting from a background cost to an active constraint—and clearer, property-level risk signals are key to easing that constraint. As 2026 approaches, the ability to differentiate risk at the individual property level will play a growing role in restoring predictability, supporting availability, and shaping housing market outcomes.

Read the full article, “The Insurance Shift Reshaping the 2026 Property Market,” in ATTOM’s Q4 2025 Housing News Report.

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