The Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I), working with Munich Re, surveyed over a thousand U.S. homeowners about how they perceive weather risk and how prepared they actually are for it. The headline number for anyone thinking about documentation: only 47 percent of homeowners have a home inventory. More than half don't have one at all.
That gap gets more interesting alongside another finding in the same survey: 25 percent of homeowners don't believe their home will ever be affected by a weather event. But among homeowners who've already been hit by one in the last five years, 92 percent expect it to happen again within the next decade. Experience is what closes the gap between "that won't happen to me" and "I should probably be ready" — the survey just quantifies how wide that gap is before something actually happens.
Being underinsured is common, and often invisible until it matters
Eighty-eight percent of homeowners in the survey have homeowners insurance — largely because mortgage lenders require it. But having a policy and having the right coverage aren't the same thing, and that's where a home inventory actually does its work. Triple-I's own guidance on the subject, in a short piece called "Three Reasons to Take a Home Inventory," lays out exactly why:
- It makes the insurance conversation concrete. An accurate list of what you own is what lets you and your insurance agent figure out if your coverage limits actually match what you'd need to replace everything — not a guess.
- It's the difference in a claim. As Triple-I puts it, "most people cannot remember what they had for breakfast much less recall the contents of their attic, kitchen cabinets or downstairs closet after a fire, storm or other catastrophe." An inventory is the thing you're not trying to reconstruct from memory under pressure.
- It documents the loss itself. Beyond insurance, a well-organized inventory is what actually substantiates a loss for tax deductions or disaster assistance applications.
None of that requires a disaster to already be underway. It just requires the list to exist before you need it.
Preparedness drops off fast once you get past insurance
The same survey found only 40 percent of homeowners have taken any steps to make their home more weather-resilient, and just 52 percent have an evacuation plan. Home inventories track a similar pattern by region — the South (52 percent) and West (50 percent) report the highest inventory rates, the Northeast the lowest (39 percent) — but nowhere does it cross the halfway mark by much. Preparedness, across the board, tends to stop at "I have insurance" rather than continuing on to "and I have a record of what that insurance is protecting."
The old advice was never wrong — it was just slow
Triple-I's own how-to guidance describes building an inventory with a notebook and receipts, or a camera and some organization. That advice isn't wrong. It's just slow enough that most people never actually start, which is presumably a meaningful part of why the survey's number sits at 47 percent instead of closer to 100.
That's the specific gap Homvi is built to close. Photograph a room, and AI identifies what's in it and estimates a replacement value automatically — the same outcome Triple-I recommends, in a few minutes instead of a weekend. If you want the exact walkthrough, we've written about the fastest way to actually document what you own.
A home inventory doesn't need a hurricane, a wildfire, or a burst pipe to justify the time. Fifty-three percent of homeowners will find that out the hard way. The other 47 percent already won't have to.