Nearmap is revolutionising how accurately insurers can assess a property, as Australia heads into its first El Niño summer in three years.

Nearmap aerial imagery and AI detection analysis provide building-level risk scores to help underwriters price more sensitively – helping bolster insurer appetite as bushfires in Australia increasingly become a year‑long threat.

Nearmap’s patented camera technology regularly captures images in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand for unique property-level intelligence.

It’s a timely breakthrough for insurers after the hottest winter on record in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, and record El Niño conditions.

“This is helping insurers actually insure more properties because they can get more granular,” said Dave Tobias, Chief Product Officer at Nearmap.

“You used to say a whole region or community was a problem, it’s all in a high-bushfire zone. Now the granularity is allowing you to get down to property level and say, ‘Here are the properties on a street that have more defensible space. The technology can get insights down to the property and building level.’

“This allows insurers to actually insure more properties. You have to get down to that granular level of the property itself to be able to make risk decisions, and the tech allows for that now.”

Nearmap analysis of bushfires that struck Victoria this year found the individual characteristics of a property significantly affect its vulnerability.

Nearmap looked at more than 36,000 buildings affected by the fires, using imagery from before and after the events and a bushfire vulnerability score to compare how they fared.

A property before and after the 2026 Victorian bushfires

It found proximity to a fire front alone did not determine the outcome. The homes that survived despite being close to a destroyed building had more cleared ground around them – what Nearmap calls “defensible space”.

“With bushfire, it’s all about defensible space. Our technology remotely can tell how much defensible space there is around a building and what is actionable for the insurer and homeowner,”  Tobias said.

Among properties close to the fire front, 6.6% of those rated most vulnerable were destroyed or badly damaged, compared with 1.8% of those rated least vulnerable.

“So, 3.6 times more survivability when you had high defensible space – that’s pretty impactful,” Tobias said. “Because we have those before and afters, we’re able to do these types of analyses at scale. This data plays out time and time again. More defensible space, less loss in a bushfire.”

Nearmap was founded in Australia in 2007 and expanded into the US more than a decade ago, and is backed by investment group Thoma Bravo. It works with governments, AECO organisations and top insurers in Australia and the US to provide actionable intelligence for every stage of the property life cycle, from building to assessing to recovering, for wind, hail, bushfire and roof quality.

Tobias says risk is evolving at a highly local, property‑level pace, yet many actuarial models remain generalised, backward‑looking and slow to adapt.

“This disconnect is becoming impossible to ignore. When underwriting relies on broad, regional models, outcomes are blunt – lower‑risk properties often overpay, while higher‑risk ones lose access to coverage altogether.”

Future insurability hinges on a move away from generalisation to precision, as reliance on postcode-level or regional data obscures differences between individual properties, producing “arbitrary and unresponsive” pricing.

With high-resolution aerial imagery – combined with AI analytics capturing factors such as vegetation, property condition and exposure history – insurers can achieve more accurate underwriting, faster claims and fairer pricing.

Nearmap portfolio analysis tools allow an insurer to gauge performance by benchmarking against all properties in the area.

“Since we have all the data, we’re able to say, this is your defensible space on the properties you have in a given area, and if your book is performing better or worse on that vector,” Tobias said.

“Defensible space matters a lot, and the technology can tell you which homes have it and which ones don’t, and how proactive risk mitigation can help avoid disaster – both from an insurance and a homeowner perspective – all with the backdrop of El  Niño.”

“We can’t change the weather, but we do have an opportunity to change outcomes.”