Several people involved in property restoration have recently sent me information about a new claims-pricing product called ITEL Total Price. Their warning is remarkably consistent, claiming that insurers are using this product to reduce payments to restoration contractors below ordinary Xactimate pricing.
I am new to this issue. I have not reviewed enough claim files, insurer instructions, fulfillment records, or contractor experiences to reach a final conclusion. Before criticizing a new program, I want to understand how it actually works. This is why I am writing about it now. Claims programs often become entrenched before policyholders and restoration contractors understand what is happening. By the time the lawsuits arrive, an insurer’s “pilot program” has become standard operating procedure. I am also looking for as much insider information as I can get on a new product that seems to work only to reduce the amounts payable after another industry program has already determined what it claims is a fair estimate of loss.
For me, the ultimate question is, “Who is ITEL Total Price really good for?” As a start for that analysis, it is always important to have background knowledge.
ITEL Laboratories began in Jacksonville in 1993 as a small laboratory analyzing carpet samples. It later expanded to include identifying and pricing flooring, roofing, siding, and other building materials, as well as material matching and repair-versus-replacement analysis. According to its company history, ITEL products now support more than one million claims annually.
Nearmap acquired ITEL in 2025. Nearmap started as an Australian aerial-imagery company and has developed a broad property-intelligence platform used by insurers for underwriting, pre-loss imagery, catastrophe assessment, measurements, damage analysis, repairability decisions, pricing, and post-repair verification. Nearmap itself was acquired by software-focused private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2022.
The combined organization can now influence nearly every stage of a property insurance claim, from examining the property before the loss to verifying repairs afterward. This is an enormous concentration of claims-related data and decision-making influence. While I have not researched this, I wonder what privacy rights policyholders have about their claims.
Nearmap announced ITEL Total Price as a new “guaranteed whole-home pricing” product embedded directly into Xactimate. It reportedly supplies localized pricing for more than 100 categories of exterior and interior building materials, including roofing products, siding, flooring, paint, drywall, cabinets, insulation, windows, and doors.
When looking at the details, ITEL Total Price does not appear to guarantee the entire cost of restoring a home. Instead, it guarantees the stated price of selected building materials through ITEL or participating fulfillment providers, generally for 60 days. It does not guarantee that a qualified contractor will complete the covered restoration for the insurer’s estimate.
A material price does not necessarily include the full cost of procurement, delivery coordination, taxes, handling, storage, waste, returns, matching manufacturing lots, warranties, supervision, permits, code compliance, demolition, disposal, difficult access, sequencing, overhead, profit, or the many surprises that arise once real construction begins. A bundle of shingles delivered to the driveway is not a completed roof.
Nearmap’s own announcement reveals the economic motivation for the product. It says early insurer customers have achieved “up to a 10x return on investment” through fewer supplements, faster cycle times, less adjuster work, and “tighter control over indemnity spend.” Those may be legitimate business goals. Unnecessary supplements and inaccurate estimates help nobody. But this is plainly a product being sold, at least in part, on its ability to control insurers’ claim payments.
So, another question I cannot get out of my head is, “Why is it no longer good enough?” Xactimate has become the common estimating language of the property insurance industry. Insurers use it. Contractors use it. Public adjusters use it. Experts use it. Nearly everybody complains about it, yet nearly everybody in the claims industry continues to use it.
Xactimate develops localized installed prices using information from suppliers, contractors, service providers, market surveys, and completed estimates. Significantly, Verisk acknowledges that Xactimate has limitations. Its own pricing policy states that no published price can be certain to fit a particular contractor, repair, or structure. The pricing is supposed to provide a market-based starting point that an estimator and adjuster can modify to reflect the actual job. This flexibility in price may be the perceived problem ITEL Total Price is designed to solve.
When a contractor says a particular material cannot be purchased or installed for the Xactimate allowance, the insurer must investigate the actual cost. ITEL gives the insurer a new answer. I think the message is, “ITEL identified the material, found a supplier, and guarantees that it can be purchased for this amount.”
This answer may be entirely legitimate when the material is genuinely comparable, actually available, delivered when needed, and usable by the policyholder’s selected contractor. ITEL may even help policyholders when it identifies a material costing more than the standard Xactimate allowance. The test should be whether the program works equally in both directions.
If the ITEL price is higher than Xactimate, does the insurer automatically increase its estimate? If ITEL determines that no genuine match exists, does the insurer expand the replacement scope? If the material cannot be delivered within the contractor’s schedule, does the insurer accept the contractor’s documented price? If the 60-day guarantee expires because the insurer took months to adjust the claim, is the price updated? If fulfillment fails, who pays the difference?
If ITEL operates just as readily to increase payments as it does to decrease them, it may be a valuable accuracy tool. If insurers treat ITEL’s lower prices as binding while treating its higher prices, failed fulfillment, unavailable materials, and matching problems as negotiable, the product becomes something very different.
Restoration contractors have legitimate concerns as well. Reputable contractors do much more than install whatever products an insurer selects from somebody else’s shopping list. They evaluate products, maintain supplier relationships, arrange delivery, verify quantities, coordinate trades, handle defective materials, provide warranties, and remain responsible when something goes wrong.
What happens when an insurer effectively converts a reputable restoration contractor into a labor provider while separating material procurement and its related compensation from the contractor’s work? Can the contractor refuse an unfamiliar supplier or questionable substitute? Who is responsible when the materials are wrong, damaged, delayed, incompatible, or unavailable in sufficient quantities? Who warrants the finished project?
Most importantly, what happens to the policyholder when a reputable contractor says, “I cannot properly perform and warranty this restoration for that amount”?
The policyholder may then face a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Accept the insurer’s preferred material, supplier, price, and perhaps contractor network—or pay the difference personally to obtain the quality restoration reasonably expected under replacement-cost coverage.
Xactimate is not the insurance policy. Neither is ITEL. The ability to purchase one component at a particular price does not conclusively establish the reasonable cost of restoring a particular structure. It does not decide whether the proposed substitute is truly like kind and quality, whether it will reasonably match what remains, or whether the completed work will return the property to its proper pre-loss condition.
I am also concerned about how ITEL pricing may be combined with insurer guidelines, adjuster performance measurements, automated estimate reviews, and managed repair programs. A seemingly neutral pricing tool can become something else when adjusters and contractors are scored or criticized for exceeding its numbers.
If ITEL Total Price ultimately operates as a carrier-directed mechanism for systematically reducing otherwise accepted Xactimate prices, its resemblance to programs designed to reduce hail and roof payments will be difficult to ignore. We have already seen how claims initiatives described as consistent, efficient, and in line with industry best practices can create institutional pressure to pay less. My recent discussions of State Farm claims strategies raised many of these same concerns.
Still, questions are not conclusions. I invite restoration contractors, public adjusters, company adjusters, insurance executives, policyholders, ITEL, Nearmap, Verisk, and others with firsthand experience to weigh in and collaborate on this investigation and the questions being posed to me by those in the restoration claims industry.
I am especially interested in actual ITEL Total Price reports, comparisons between original Xactimate pricing and substituted ITEL pricing, insurer training materials, adjuster instructions, contractor communications, complete guarantee terms, successful fulfillments, failed orders, and examples in which ITEL caused an insurer to increase rather than decrease its payment.
If this product produces accurate prices, fair contractor compensation, quality repairs, and faster restoration for policyholders, those facts should be reported. If it is primarily another mechanism for chiseling claim payments below what reputable contractors require to perform quality work, that should be exposed as well.
For now, my initial question remains: Who is ITEL Total Price really good for?
Thought For The Day
“The result is fewer estimate revisions, greater efficiency for insurers and contractors, and faster restorations of properties.”
—Aaron Brunko, President of Verisk Property Estimating Solutions
