When you apply for home insurance, you spark a series of database inqueries and "score" calculations that your home insurer uses to decide whether to sell you a policy, and at what price. In fact, there's an entire industry built around assessing you as an insurance customer.

A key decision factor in whether an insurer will offer you a home insurance policy and what your premium will be is your "insurance risk scores." Like a credit score, or FICO score, it's based on information from your credit report but weighted on different factors. Thus, even if you purchase your credit score from one of the major credit-reporting agencies, you still don't know your "insurance risk score." Insurers says that these scores are useful in predicting whether or not you will file future claims; opponents say that scores discriminate against the poor and minorities, who generally have lower scores.

Gentlemen, start your databases

ChoicePoint, headquartered in Atlanta and a market leader in providing insurance scores to insurers, sells ChoicePoint Attract Home Insurance Scores, based on credit reports, that are used by insurers to help decide whether to sell you a policy and to set your rate. You can order your own ChoicePoint Attract score at www.choicetrust.com for $12.95 to see your insurance score, how your score compares to other consumers and your "risk category."

ChoicePoint maintains a database called C.L.U.E. (Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange). The company sells "C.L.U.E. Personal Property" reports to insurers that contain a five-year history of claims associated with your home insurance, including loss types, dates of loss, amounts paid, and your past and present policies numbers, claim numbers and home insurers. You can receive your "C.L.U.E. Personal Property" Report free at www.choicetrust.com and can dispute any inaccurate information in it, much like a credit report.

Fair Isaac, in addition to personal insurance scores, sells a Property PredictR Insurance Score in conjunction with Millenium Information Services. When you buy a new home policy, your insurer likely performs a property inspection. Details recorded by the inspector get loaded into the system, factors are weighted according to importance, and Property PredictR then issues a score to predict your risk as customer.

About 25 details about your property, known as "risk characteristics," are compiled, such as the condition and size of your house, the condition of your roof, the breed of dog you have, any unfenced pool, cracked walkways and debris or flammable material next to the house. The condition of your house is weighted more than other factors to calculate the final score.

"The way someone maintains the home is an indication of future major or minor loss," explains Lamont Boyd, Property PredictR product manager for Fair Isaac.

The Property PredictR score helps your insurer decide to accept or refuse your policy, set your coverage amount and determine your premium, and even recommends when to "cross-sell" or "up-sell" you — for example, to offer you an auto policy, too, or to market additional coverages to you.

The Insurance Services Office (ISO) sells insurers access to its A-PLUS (Automobile-Property Loss Underwriting Service) database, which contains three to five years worth of claims information on all types of losses, including auto and home insurance. ISO says that 95 percent of property-casualty insurers contribute auto and home claims for the A-PLUS database.

Insurance agents and underwriters use A-PLUS to determine whether to sell a policy to you. You can get your A-PLUS report free by calling the A-PLUS Consumer Report Request Line at (800) 627-3487.

In addition, another product from ISO, called ISO Passport, will show home insurers:

• Its A-PLUS property database information on you.
• Its "LOCATION" risk-assessment tool for your address, which includes information on fire-protection classifications, crime-risk details, your house's distance to a major body of water or coast (for windstorm risk), flood zones, and the area's risks for hurricanes, thunderstorms, earthquakes and other natural disasters.
• Your credit score.
• Your "credit loss history score," which combines claims information from the A-PLUS database with your credit information from TransUnion.

ISO also tells insurers about what your neighbors are likely paying for their insurance. ISO's "Homeowners ZIP Code Profiles" database lets insurers pull up information about your ZIP code to find out average coverages and premiums, the average cost of claims and how often folks in your ZIP code submit claims.

When you make a claim

The ISO maintains a giant database of more than 500 million claims, called ClaimSearch. It is not used by insurers in deciding whether to sell you a policy or set your rate, but it's used when claims are made to detect fraud and "evaluate" policyholder claims histories.

The ClaimSearch system searches the database for other claims made by the same person or business. If the ISO sees a series of claims that looks suspicious — for example, the same name appears on all the claims with a different Social Security number — the company will notify the insurance company and the insurer will investigate. The ISO also has information about any of your claims that might have ended up in court. ISO says it receives 48 million claims annually for the database and more than 93 percent of property/casualty insurers use it.

You can request a copy of the ClaimSearch data on you for $15 by calling ISO customer support at (800) 888-4476. You'll need to fill out a Citizen's Inquiry Form and provide proof of identity.