A statement of values (SOV) is the schedule of every insured property location and its replacement-cost value that commercial property underwriters price from.
A statement of values (SOV) is a document that lists every property location, building, and physical asset a business wants to insure, together with the replacement-cost value assigned to each one. In commercial property insurance, the SOV is the schedule an underwriter prices from: it drives the premium, sets the policy limits, and decides how much of a loss the carrier will actually pay.
Most SOVs arrive as a spreadsheet or a PDF attached to a submission, one row per location. A small retailer might have a single line. A national logistics operator might have four thousand. The format is rarely standardized, which is exactly why the SOV is one of the slowest documents to move through underwriting intake.
What does a statement of values include?
An SOV captures the underwriting-relevant detail for each location, usually organized around the COPE framework (construction, occupancy, protection, exposure). The core fields are below.
| Field | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Location address | Street, city, state, ZIP for each insured site, used for geocoding and catastrophe modeling. |
| Construction type | Frame, joisted masonry, non-combustible, fire-resistive, and similar classes. |
| Occupancy | How the building is used (office, warehouse, manufacturing, retail). |
| Year built and square footage | Age, size, and number of stories that inform replacement cost. |
| Protection | Sprinklers, alarms, and the responding fire district or protection class. |
| Building value | Replacement cost of the structure itself. |
| Contents and business income | Business personal property, stock, and business interruption or rental value. |
| Total insured value (TIV) | The sum of building, contents, and business income for the location. |
The SOV usually travels alongside the ACORD applications in a submission. For how those structured forms move through intake, see the ACORD form entry, and for the broader intake step it feeds, see submission intake.
Why does statement of values accuracy matter for underwriting?
Because the SOV sets the values, an error on it flows straight into premium and into the claim. Two failure modes matter most.
Underinsurance is the first. When the values on the SOV lag the real cost to rebuild, the carrier collects premium on a number that is too low and the insured is exposed at claim time. Most commercial property policies carry a coinsurance clause that requires the insured to schedule at least 80 to 90 percent of replacement cost; fall below that line and the payout on even a partial loss is reduced proportionally. Construction cost inflation makes this a moving target, so a stale SOV drifts out of insurance-to-value quietly, one renewal at a time.
The second is competitive. The commercial property market has been softening: US property insurance rates fell 9 percent in the first quarter of 2025 (Marsh, Global Insurance Market Index, Q1 2025), and global commercial rates fell 5 percent in the first quarter of 2026, a seventh consecutive quarterly decline (Marsh, 2026). When price stops being the lever, the carrier that turns a clean quote around first tends to win the account. That makes how fast an underwriter can trust the SOV a real advantage, not a back-office detail. The same logic applies to the loss history that rides with a property submission; see loss run for how that document is normalized.
How does Pibit.AI speed up statement of values processing?
Keying an SOV by hand is where property submissions stall. A four-thousand-row schedule in a broker's own spreadsheet layout can take a team days to transcribe and reconcile before an underwriter even sees it. That is the turnaround problem an AI-native platform is built to remove.
Pibit.AI reads the SOV in whatever format it arrives, spreadsheet or PDF, and normalizes every location into a consistent schema. DocumentCURE handles the extraction; Pibit's managed human-in-the-loop review team validates the fields, which is what backs the 99.9 percent contractual field-level accuracy commitment. The result is faster turnaround without trading away the accuracy that the premium and the coinsurance calculation depend on. Carriers on the platform have seen up to 85 percent faster underwriting turnaround, and in a single month one managed program processed 1,053 loss runs and 626 submissions with zero errors. Speed and accuracy stop being a trade-off, which is the point of an AI-native approach rather than an offshore keying team or an AI-only tool. For the wider line this sits inside, see commercial property insurance.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a statement of values and a certificate of insurance?
A statement of values lists the insured property locations and their replacement-cost values so the carrier can price and set limits. A certificate of insurance is a one-page proof that a policy exists, shared with a third party such as a landlord or lender. The SOV goes to the underwriter; the certificate goes to someone verifying coverage.
What is total insured value (TIV) on a statement of values?
Total insured value is the sum of the building value, contents or business personal property, and business income or rental value for a location. Add the TIV across every row and you have the total exposure the carrier is being asked to cover, which anchors both the premium and the catastrophe accumulation view.
Why do underwriters delay submissions with incomplete statements of values?
Missing construction type, protection details, or values force the underwriter to go back to the broker before the risk can be priced. Each round trip adds days, and an SOV with values below replacement cost raises coinsurance and insurance-to-value concerns that have to be resolved first. Clean, complete SOV data is the fastest path to a quote.
