Research estimates the accumulated cost of deferred maintenance across U.S. public infrastructure alone at $1 trillion. That figure captures only what governments own and track. The exposure across the broader built environment is larger still, and carriers pricing commercial property portfolios are already absorbing its consequences.
Executive Summary
"Carriers that build proactive maintenance engagement programs are creating something difficult to replicate. They are building operational integration with the policyholder at the property level, supported by proprietary data that accumulates value over time," writes Jon DeWald, CEO of HelixIntel, an InsurTech that connects carriers to policyholder maintenance operations.Here, DeWald describes how carriers that engage more directly on maintenance can create durable advantages, including more precise underwriting, longitudinal property-level data, targeted loss control and risk-based pricing grounded in prevention.
What has been harder to solve than the size of the problem is the operational question: how can a carrier engage with that risk across thousands of properties before it becomes a claim? Until recently, that infrastructure did not exist at scale. It does now, and the carriers building it are establishing a competitive position that compounds in ways pricing alone cannot replicate.
Every aging electrical system, failing fire suppression component and piece of critical equipment operating past its service life represents exposure across property, workers compensation and general liability simultaneously. One deferred task can connect multiple coverage lines to a shared root cause—something none of those lines are individually structured to see.
The issue is not that maintenance teams lack awareness of deteriorating conditions. The challenge has been that insurers have not had a systematic way to connect to that knowledge and act on it before it becomes a claim. That capability is now emerging.
