A start-up owes you a number.

Any business asking for the market's time has to show where the value is. A start-up doubly so: no track record, no book, no years of goodwill — just a claim, and claims are cheap. The claim has to be checkable, or it is noise.

That is a harder bar in construction insurance than almost anywhere else, and it is worth being honest about why before saying how we intend to clear it.

The problem: physical damage cannot prove it yet

The natural place to show that continuous site data is worth something is the physical damage cover — the CAR and EAR policies at the centre of every placement. Show that monitored projects lose less, and the market will pay for the connection.

That proof cannot be produced today, and the reason splits in two, because the losses do.

The attritional losses — water above all — are frequent enough to measure, but the market has already responded in its own way: deductibles pushed up until much of that cost sits back with the contractor. Whatever monitoring saves there is mostly the insured's own money, which is why the trades that exist are deductible trades. The severe losses — the fires, the collapses, the defects — are what a book is really priced on, and they arrive too rarely, vary too much in cause and severity, and attach to projects too unalike in value, duration, method and peril mix for any book to accumulate enough comparable events to isolate what continuous evidence contributed. The frequent losses are retained; the rare ones cannot be counted. That proof will come, in time, as monitored projects accumulate across books. But it is not coming in a timeframe that helps anyone placing a project now.

For a start-up, that is close to disqualifying. The pitch would be: buy this, and something you cannot measure will improve by an amount I cannot state, on a timescale I cannot promise. The market is right to refuse that pitch.

Two kinds of proof

There are two ways to establish what site data is worth to an insurance outcome.

You can measure it, which requires enough losses to count, and which belongs to whoever holds the book.

Or you can calculate it, which requires only figures that have already been agreed.

Physical damage supplies neither: the losses are too rare to count, and nothing about their size is agreed in advance. But one cover in the construction programme is different, and it is the twist this whole argument turns on.

Delay in start-up: where the value can be shown today

The cover where measurement is least available turns out to be the cover where calculation is most available.

Delay in start-up — DSU (or ALOP depending on where you learned it) — is the financial impact that follows the physical damage, and its losses are the rarest and most project-specific of all. No book will measure them soon. But DSU cover details are written down before anybody argues about anything: the sum insured, the indemnity period, the waiting period and the rate, all agreed at binding.

DSU is not on every project, and it is worth saying so plainly. It is bought where delay has financed consequences — a lender or a revenue stream waiting on completion. But where it is present, the value of a continuous site record can be shown on day one, on the policy's own figures, without waiting for anybody's loss study.

That is a weaker form of proof than the study, and worth saying plainly too. It is also available today, and it has one property a loss study does not: the numbers belong to the reader rather than to us. Not the fallback. The starting point.

So we have published a calculator rather than a case study.

What the calculator refuses to do

The obvious way to build a tool like this is to ask how many days a continuous account of the site would save, multiply by the daily value, and present the result as a return. That would be an argument dressed as a number.

So Reality Capture Value asks the question the other way round. Given a sum insured, an indemnity period, a waiting period, a rate and a capture cost, how many days off the waiting period would repay the capture spend outright? Everything beyond that threshold is gain. Everything short of it is still carried alone.

Nobody has to estimate anything. Only figures already held go in, and the threshold falls out of the arithmetic. How many days a continuous, time-stamped account of a site actually saves remains an open question, and it is not ours to answer with a number.

Every figure is worked out in the browser and nothing is stored. That is the point of publishing it rather than presenting it in a meeting.

None of this is hypothetical — it has happened one line over

Credit where it belongs; our friends at Shepherd, the US construction insurtech, have already done the measured version — on casualty, where it can be done. Casualty produces losses often enough to count: a book of contractor programmes generates enough events in a year or two that the difference between a monitored population and an unmonitored one becomes visible, and then defensible. Shepherd assembled every ingredient properly. Their programme, Shepherd Savings, rewards contractors for the technology already on their sites — OpenSpace, DroneDeploy, Samsara, Brickeye, Procore and others — with premium savings of up to 25%, calculated upfront at quote stage rather than promised at some future renewal. Their headline finding is 50% lower loss frequency against the industry average; one published case study records 15% premium savings on a $260M owner-controlled programme in Atlanta. In July The Insurer reported them claiming a first-mover position in pricing casualty risk off field-capture technology. It is a claim nobody has publicly contested, and on their published record, easy to believe. The team at Shepherd have earned it.

It is worth being precise about what made that possible, because I think the obvious explanation is the wrong one. The tempting account is that casualty renews annually while a project policy is bound once, so one can be measured and the other cannot. Renewal does help — it lets you watch the same insured before and after, which is what makes a figure like their 26% loss-rate reduction after adoption possible. But it is not what makes the comparison possible in the first place. The 50% finding compares two populations of contractors and required no renewal at all; one of their flagship case studies is a wrap-up, a project placement. What separates the lines is frequency.

And when Shepherd themselves moved towards the project side — builder's risk, with Brickeye as an additional partner — their offering changed in kind: reduced water-damage deductibles and premium credits at binding, 50% or more, according to their chief executive in Engineering News-Record. A logical forward-looking judgement about a physical loss mechanism, reasoned from how water damage happens, rather than a finding drawn from accumulated experience on that line. The same ENR piece quotes Zurich's head of construction property on what risk control can be worth on a large project: the difference between a $2M and a $1M water-damage deductible. Even the best-evidenced operators in this market switch from measurement to reasoning as soon as the losses stop being frequent.

That is the map. Casualty has its measured proof. The project covers will earn theirs slowly, attritional end first. DSU has its arithmetic now.

Price is the lever the market reaches for

Which brings us to what the arithmetic exposes.

Every incentive currently on offer for instrumented sites is a price incentive. Premium credits, discounts, reduced deductibles. That is the natural lever, and it works — Shepherd has demonstrated that it works.

It is also bounded. A discount is capped at the premium; days are capped only by the waiting period itself. And on a large project, a day inside the waiting period is worth a great deal more to the insured than a percentage point of premium is.

What it costs an underwriter to grant those days looks, at first, like the hard question — the days nearest the waiting period are the ones most often reached, so they are not cheap. But consider what the underwriter is holding instead. A DSU exposure is dark for the whole life of the project: the claim cannot be adjusted until practical completion, because until the project finishes nobody knows how long the delay was. For the life of the project, the book carries a risk it can neither see nor settle.

Days granted against a continuous, time-stamped account of the site buy their way out of both problems at once. The delay stops being a reconstruction and becomes something observed as it develops — the impact of the damage on completion is understood while it is happening, not argued about afterwards. And the same account does more than record the delay: accurate, shared data in the hands of the insured with assistance from their insurers is part of what drives a completion date back within reach.

That is why the exchange runs in both directions rather than being a concession. The insured gives up nothing they were not already generating. The underwriter gives up days against an exposure the data itself makes clearer.

A concession granted against a self-reported programme update is a concession granted against an assertion.

Days granted against the site's own account are days granted against the thing that reduces the need for them.

Two honest caveats

Every Shepherd figure cited above is American: US casualty, US wrap-ups, US water-damage deductibles. A London underwriter can reasonably say that wholesale is a different market with different frequency drivers, and they would have a point. But the mechanism still travels.

And the causal question stays open. That site data reduces delay, or shortens the argument about delay, is a proposition rather than a finding. The calculator does not attempt to settle it. It shows where the threshold sits; what anyone believes about crossing it is their own judgement.

Pikt gives risk engineers continuous visibility of the projects they oversee, by connecting to the technology already running on site. The method behind that is set out in Reality-Driven Intelligence, and why we started covers the rest. The calculator is at Reality Capture Value.