Methods and Systems For Estimating Building Reconstruction Costs

Abstract

Systems and methods are provided for estimating a reconstruction cost for a building as well as for a designated area within a building. Reconstruction pricing data based on builder-supplied full reconstruction-cost data are stored in a database from which the data is accessed by geographic location, building-category and building-area type. The accessed data are used to produce the reconstruction cost estimate.

1 . A method for estimating a reconstruction cost for a designated area within a building, comprising: 
 providing access to a database of reconstruction-pricing data comprising:    (a) a plurality of price-index data indexed by corresponding geographic location and representing reconstruction-pricing data for a plurality of different building types and a plurality of different building-area types within a building,    (b) comparative building-category data representing relative pricing levels for reconstructing each of a plurality of different building categories, and    (c) comparative building-area data representing relative pricing levels for reconstructing each of the plurality of different building-area types within a building;    providing geographic-location data of a predetermined building;    providing building category-defining data for the predetermined building;    providing building area-type data for at least one designated area within the building, the building area-type data being selected from the plurality of different building-area types within a building;    obtaining relevant price-index data from the database for the geographic location of the predetermined building based on the geographic-location data;    obtaining relevant comparative building-category data from the database for the predetermined building based on the building category-defining data for the predetermined building;    obtaining relevant comparative building-area data from the database based on the at least one building-area type data for the designated area; and    determining and providing to a user a partial or total reconstruction-cost estimate based on a reconstruction-cost estimate for the at least one designated area within the building based on the relevant price-index data, the relevant comparative building-category data and the relevant comparative building-area data.