Insurance Contents Pricing Software Built for Real Claims

Pricing is where contents work slows down

Done by hand, every line is the same seven steps: write a description, search it, open several retailers, compare what is actually the same product, choose one, copy the URL, then look up the depreciation for the category and the age. Four hundred lines is four hundred rounds of that. The judgment in it is real but thin; the typing is enormous.

What the pricing engine does per item

One query per item against the Kevin Content Pricing Engine, which spans major retailers, specialty stores, brand-direct storefronts and marketplaces. There is no roster of individual stores to maintain and no per-retailer integration to break.

• Build the query

  From the identified item — brand, product type, model — rather than from the whole description. Condition and damage wording is kept out of the search; it belongs on the line, not in the query.

• Reject what is not the item

  Wrong variant, wrong capacity or size, a bundle priced as a single unit, an accessory for the product rather than the product.

• Collapse duplicates

  The same listing surfaced twice counts once, so a popular product does not drag the set toward one seller.

• Discard outliers

  A mispriced listing in either direction is removed rather than averaged in, which is what makes a single-listing price defensible.

• Price from one listing

  The unit cost equals one real listing rather than an average of several, and the row links to it.

• Fall through to resale

  Only when retail cannot price the item. The resale figure is used raw, with no gross-up, and labelled as resale.

Retail first, resale only when retail cannot answer

Most household property is still sold new, so retail prices it. Vintage, discontinued and collectible items often are not, and for those the resale market is the only honest source of a replacement figure. Kevin uses it raw — there is no back-solve, no grossing-up toward a hypothetical retail price — and marks it as resale wherever the comp appears, because a used-market price read as a new-replacement price is a defensibility problem waiting to happen.

What makes a comparable valid

The source stays on the line

kevin.co/claims/…/worksheet

The panel shows a sample of the comparables found for a line, not the whole set.

Depreciation comes after pricing

Replacement cost first, then the schedule: the item's content class gives its useful life, the age you enter gives the percentage, and the server computes the dollar amount and the actual cash value. The schedule carries 31 categories and 87 sub-lines, and depreciation runs all the way to 100% — an item past its useful life shows an ACV of $0.00 rather than stopping at an invented floor. The page never computes any of this; it renders what the server returns, so the worksheet and the export cannot disagree.

Common questions