What an SOV includes
A typical SOV lists each location's address and its building, contents and business income values, along with construction, occupancy, year built, square footage and protection such as sprinklers. Underwriters often group these characteristics as COPE: construction, occupancy, protection and exposure.
Why accuracy matters
Property pricing and catastrophe modeling depend directly on the SOV, so understated values or vague construction data lead to mispriced risks, coinsurance problems at claim time or declinations.
Why SOVs are hard to handle
SOVs come as spreadsheets in the insured's own layout, sometimes with hundreds of locations, merged cells and missing fields. Brokers clean and reformat them for each market, and carriers and reinsurers clean them again before modeling.
Where automation helps
Automated SOV handling maps any layout onto a standard schema, validates addresses, flags missing or implausible values and produces the format each market or model requires, leaving the gaps to a person.