Lemonade places more focus on homeowners insurance

The fact that Lemonade has historically invested most of its efforts and resources on renters insurance is no secret. “Currently, the large majority of our users are renters,” the company stated in its latest quarterly report. And even when the company had opportunities to sell homeowners insurance, it said no more often than it said yes. “Specifically with regard to homeowners, really, since the get-go, we’ve been fairly conservative in our underwriting,” Daniel Schreiber recently shared. “So we have refused to quote or declined to quote more homeowners than we actually quote.”

Now, however, Lemonade is making more of push into the homeowners market. The company is hiring a Homeowners Operations Manager who will oversee a team of 8 to 10 individuals who maintain its back-end servicing of homeowners policies and communications with mortgage lenders. In addition, Lemonade recently had an opening for an Underwriting Support Associate who will focus on reviewing its homeowners business and scheduled personal property.

The last indication is an open position for an Agency Partner Manager. It’s safe to assume that Lemonade is looking to leverage agents for its homeowners business, which is more complex by nature as acknowledged by Schreiber recently. “So I just think the permutations in homeowners insurance are far more complex. And perhaps, for that reason, they grew up in a kind of personalized, being sold through brokers rather than being handled by algorithms that couldn’t do it in the past.”

This last piece involving agents brings back memories from the company’s S-1 where it stated the following: “We leverage technology in everything we do. More than 93% of homeowners insurance policies in the United States are sold via agents, making a platform that finds, onboards, and digitally serves consumers end-to-end very much an outlier.”

Bottom Line: Lemonade is very much not an outlier.