RAPAPORT...
Jewelry losses by dollar value in the U.S. this past year surged to the top of the list of property insurance claims, according to Enservio, which reported its findings in the annual Contents Claims Index (CCI) today. Jewelry claims rose from 13 percent among the top 10 contents-loss categories in 2010 to 17 percent for Replacement Cost Value (RCV) in 2011, surpassing electronics, which dropped to second place at 13 percent. Other top categories on the list --based upon value of claims-- included apparel, furniture, home goods, tools, appliances, sporting goods, books and magazines, and bed and mattress. "In 2011, we've seen the switch in position between the electronics and jewelry categories, while the overall category rankings and rankings within each category indicate only slight changes year on year," said Jon McNeill, the chief executive of Enservio. "These top level insights and the ability to mine content data for deeper and more granular trends provide valuable intelligence for insurance carrier product and business strategy planning." The Enservio CCI aggregated and analyzed claims reported by more than 300 U.S. property insurers, providing insights on more than 20 million individually appraised personal and business items that were lost, damaged or stolen. In the jewelry category, the number of claims increased by 57 percent in 2011 and theft of jewelry, electronics and tools combined accounted for 62 percent of all RCV claimed for theft versus 35 percent for all other categories combined. Rings, watches and necklaces all maintained their ranking within the jewelry category as top loss-claim items, Enservio found. The 2011 Enservio CCI also revealed that jewelry claims were more prevalent on the West Coast of the U.S. than for any other region.
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