PERILS has today revealed its fourth and final industry loss estimate for the April 2020 Central Queensland hailstorms. The independent catastrophe insurance data provider gave a final estimate of the insurance market loss as AU$839 million, compared to the third loss estimate of AU$604 million issued by PERILS on October 19, 2020.
As per PERILS event definition, the loss number covers the property and motor hull lines of business. Unusually for a hailstorm event, motor losses represented only 4% of the total industry loss, while 96% were due to losses in property lines of business.
The report is released 12 months after the hailstorms struck the central region of the state of Queensland, Australia which was an unusual event for the region given the extreme size of hailstones and its late occurrence in the season. As a result of the event, the insurance industry also faced numerous challenges dealing with late and significant claims development. PERILS’ report is based on detailed loss data collected from the majority of the Australian insurance market and provides a comprehensive breakdown of property and motor losses by postcode.
The data included in the report is further divided by residential and commercial lines, and provides loss amounts split into buildings, contents and business interruption losses where available. This is complemented by information on damage degrees and hail size based on radar measurements by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The dataset created is therefore well suited for the validation of hail vulnerability functions for motor and property risks in probabilistic cat models.
Commenting on the report, Darryl Pidcock, head of PERILS Asia-Pacific, noted that the industry experienced a number of challenging events in 2020 between the Australian bushfires, hailstorms in January and October as well as an East Coast Low event. While the Central Queensland hailstorms were not as significant in industry loss terms as other events, he said, the event did present the industry with challenges regarding how to deal with significant claims being lodged some months after the event.
“Lessons gained from these losses include the effect of local building regulations to better understand potential exposures and how these can be captured in models,” he said. “We are very pleased to support the market by providing this industry loss data to facilitate improvements in modelling especially regarding vulnerabilities and would also like to thank our insurance partners for enabling us to compile this report.”
