Most insurance problems on a California house are visible from the driveway.

How underwriting actually looks at a house

The first pass is location, and it happens before anyone opens a photo. Mapped hazard zone, the insurer's own wildfire model, how much continuous fuel touches the parcel, how far the responding station is. If location alone puts the risk outside an insurer's appetite, nothing about the house moves the answer.

The second pass is the structure. This is where your eyes are genuinely useful, because most of what matters is visible from the street and the back yard. The question underwriting is asking is narrow: if embers land here, does anything catch.

One thing to hold onto before you read any map. Insurers run their own wildfire models, not the state's, and they were scoring exposure long before the state maps were updated. So neither "the map says moderate" nor "the map says very high" is an answer about coverage. The map is one input among several, and it is the only one you can pull yourself.

Location: decided before anyone sees the house

Start with the state's own address-level fire hazard severity zone lookup at osfm.fire.ca.gov/FHSZ, and pull the exact address rather than the neighborhood. State responsibility area maps took effect April 1, 2024. Local responsibility area maps were released in phases in February and March 2025, adding moderate and high zones to local maps for the first time. Plenty of California properties are now mapped that never were before.

After the zone, three physical questions do most of the work: can fire reach the structure, can apparatus reach the structure, and how fast would either happen. Continuous brush or open space touching the lot answers the first. A single access road, a long private drive, or narrow switchbacks answer the second.

Slope answers the third. Fire moves fastest uphill. A house at the top of a slope with fuel below it faces a faster, hotter run than the same house on flat ground.

There is one location factor nobody expects and it stops transactions cold. When a fire is burning near an area, insurers commonly suspend writing new business there until it is contained. A file with no relationship to that fire simply cannot get a new policy bound while the suspension is on. No one in the escrow can influence it.

Structure: the features that come up over and over

California has already published the list, in the wildfire hardening notice required by Civil Code 1102.6f. It names non-ember-resistant vents, untreated wood shingle or shake roofs, and combustible landscaping within five feet of the structure. It also names single-pane or non-tempered windows, loose or missing flashing, and uncovered gutters. The notice exists for disclosure, but it maps almost exactly onto what an underwriter asks about.

The mechanism behind that list is worth understanding, because it makes the items memorable. Most homes lost in a wildfire are not lost to a wall of flame arriving at the property line. They are lost to embers, which travel well ahead of the fire. Embers land somewhere on or against the structure and find something that will hold a flame long enough to matter.

A shake roof holds it. A needle-packed gutter holds it. Bark mulch against the siding holds it. An unscreened vent carries it inside.

Two more items sit on nearly every application without appearing on the statutory list. Roof age is one, because many insurers cap the age they will write at all.

Settlement terms for older roofs have also moved more than once in the last two years. Attached wood decks are the other. A deck is a horizontal ember trap physically bolted to the house, and whatever is stored underneath it is usually the real fuel.

What to do with what you find

Record it, do not rate it. Photograph the roof, the eaves, the siding, the deck, the five feet around the foundation, and the approach road. Note dates. That file is worth more than any conclusion you could draw from it.

Then stop there. Which of these items an underwriter treats as a decline, a surcharge, a required repair, or a shrug is an insurance judgment.

A California real estate license does not carry that call. Telling a client that a wood shake roof will cost them a certain amount, or that clearing brush will fix the problem, is an opinion. It is exactly the kind the regulations reserve to licensed insurance professionals.

What you can do is get the facts in front of someone who is licensed to weigh them, early. On a purchase, that means running the coverage search at acceptance rather than after inspections clear. Insurance is its own contingency with its own clock. It is the only deadline in the file whose answer depends on a third party who has never seen it.

Documentation is the part that gets skipped

Mitigation only counts when it is written down. An insurer's file sees what is in it, and undocumented work is indistinguishable from work that never happened. Consider a seller who cleared to a hundred feet, replaced vents, and boxed the eaves, but kept no record of any of it. From an underwriting standpoint, they have done nothing.

Nobody can tell you in advance what a given retrofit will be worth, because insurers score mitigation differently and some barely score it at all. That uncertainty is not a reason to skip the paperwork. It is the reason to keep it, because a documented item can be credited and an undocumented one cannot be.