Verisk and Chimnie both supply property data to UK insurers, but they come at it from opposite ends of the market. Verisk is a $37 billion Nasdaq-listed analytics group that entered the UK through acquisition, building an insurance-focused property database from its Cambridge base. Chimnie is a UK-born property data bureau that sells to insurers, lenders, and property services firms through open APIs and published pricing.
This comparison is based on publicly available product information, client case studies, and direct experience working with both platforms. It's intended to help procurement and data teams understand where each fits rather than to declare a winner.
Who is Verisk?
Verisk Analytics was founded in 1971 as the Insurance Services Office in the United States. It listed on Nasdaq in 2009 and now sits in both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, with a market capitalisation around $37 billion and annual revenue of $2.88 billion. After selling its energy division (Wood Mackenzie, for $3.1 billion in 2022) and its financial services assets, the company now operates as a single insurance-focused segment.
Verisk's UK property data operations trace back to its 2016 acquisition of the GeoInformation Group, a Cambridge-based geospatial data firm founded in 1998. That business went through several rebrandings - Geomni UK, then Verisk 3D Visual Intelligence UK, and most recently "Land and Buildings Data" under the Verisk umbrella. The core product is UKBuildings, a national database covering 98% of detailed building attributes across 29 million addresses in Great Britain, plus the Belfast urban area in Northern Ireland.
Beyond building data, Verisk offers eight peril models (flood, subsidence, storm, theft, fire, escape of water, freeze, and accidental damage), rebuild cost estimates for residential and commercial properties, an address verification service called AddressIT, and the Data Insight Hub - a real-time API aggregation platform used by major insurers at price comparison volumes. Its London Market division, Sequel, handles underwriting and claims software for roughly 40% of the Lloyd's market.
Named UK clients include Hastings Direct, Hiscox, Beazley, Tokio Marine HCC, and Aviva. Verisk is deeply embedded in UK insurance infrastructure, and its financial resources dwarf those of any UK-specific property data competitor.
Verisk website homepage
Who is Chimnie?
Chimnie was founded by Jon Francis, a former data scientist from Google's innovation team, with the goal of making UK property data more transparent and accessible. The company operates two platforms: chimnie.com, a B2B property data bureau serving insurers, lenders, and property services firms; and chimnie.co.uk, a free consumer research site with over 150,000 users whose feedback validates the underlying data at scale.
Chimnie processes around 30 million virtual property assessments each month, drawing on hundreds of geospatial, environmental, and proprietary datasets. Its product range includes the UK Residential Property Database, the UK Commercial Property Database, a free AVM, rebuild cost estimates, address autocomplete, risk scoring, and AI training data. Delivery is via API or flat file, with published pricing starting from less than one penny per lookup.
Feature comparison
Building characteristics and coverage
Both platforms hold detailed building attributes - construction type, roof material, age, floor area, number of storeys, basement indicators, EPC data - and both link records to UPRNs and geocodes. Verisk's UKBuildings draws on aerial imagery classification and Ordnance Survey data, covering 29 million addresses across Great Britain and the Belfast urban area. Chimnie covers the whole of the UK, including all of Northern Ireland, returning over 500 attributes per property.
The coverage gap matters most in Northern Ireland. Verisk's data extends to the Belfast urban area but doesn't cover the rest of the province. Chimnie has no such exclusion. For insurers writing policies across the full UK, that's a practical difference that affects quoting workflows and data completeness.
Peril and risk models
This is where Verisk has genuine depth. Its eight peril models - flood, subsidence, storm, theft, fire, escape of water, freeze, and accidental damage - are recalibrated regularly against claims data and have been embedded in UK insurer workflows for years. The subsidence model alone draws on geology, vegetation, climate, and historical claims. Escape of water modelling uses over 100 million data records across 26 million properties. These aren't theoretical - they're used by Hastings, Hiscox, and Beazley in production, and they're hard to replicate quickly.
Chimnie covers flood, subsidence, crime, pollution, traffic, energy performance, roof condition (via satellite imagery and machine learning), tree-fall risk, solar panel detection, garden boundaries, and listed building status. The range is broader but shallower in certain categories. Chimnie's approach is to provide raw risk signals and scores that clients can feed into their own pricing models, whereas Verisk's peril models are more fully formed and ready to plug into rating engines.
Automated valuation model (AVM)
Verisk doesn't offer a property market valuation in the UK. Its rebuild cost estimates tell you what it would cost to reconstruct a building, but they don't tell you what the property is worth on the open market. For any use case that needs a current market value - mortgage pre-screening, portfolio monitoring, insurance sum-insured validation against market price - Verisk leaves a gap.
Chimnie provides a free AVM built on Bayesian hierarchical methods with calibrated confidence intervals. It produces separate listing and sale price estimates at micro-postcode granularity. UPRN-based lookups are free; address-based lookups start from pennies per call.
Rebuild cost estimates
Both platforms offer rebuild cost estimates, and both do it credibly. Verisk's residential model (ResInsight) uses a quantity surveyor pricing methodology and is packaged specifically for insurance underwriting, with regular updates reflecting changing material and labour costs. In October 2025, Verisk launched a commercial rebuild product targeting the estimated 46% of UK commercial properties that are underinsured.
Chimnie's rebuild cost model provides confidence intervals, finish-quality segmentation, and decomposed materials and labour breakdowns at regional level. Chimnie also offers a dedicated rebuild cost calculator for quick lookups. Both approaches are solid; the difference is more about how you access them and what you pay.
Planning data
Verisk holds no planning application or planning permission data. Chimnie is completing two years of national ingestion across every UK local authority, with the full planning dataset launching imminently. Once live, it will be the only standardised, UK-wide planning permission dataset available from a single provider - covering extensions, conversions, change-of-use applications, and new builds. For insurance, this matters because a property that's had a rear extension or loft conversion approved may carry a materially different risk profile and rebuild cost than existing building records suggest.
Outbuildings and property features
Chimnie maps outbuildings separately and values them independently - detached garages, annexes, garden offices, sheds. It also detects solar panels, extensions, and roof type using satellite imagery and machine learning. Verisk's building data focuses on the main dwelling. For insurance, where an unmapped annexe or garden office can mean an underinsured claim, this granularity has direct commercial value.
Address search
Verisk offers AddressIT, covering 30 million addressable UK properties via Royal Mail PAF, with confidence scoring and property classification. Chimnie provides a free address autocomplete API designed for form pre-fill in insurance and lending journeys. Both work. Chimnie's is free; Verisk's sits behind enterprise licensing.
Pricing and access
Chimnie publishes its pricing - lookups from less than one penny per property, PAYG at £0.45 per property with ratecard volume discounts, and the full residential database from around four thousand pounds per month. The API documentation is open and you can start evaluating without a sales call.
Verisk doesn't publish pricing. Contracts are bespoke, enterprise-scale, and typically involve longer commitment periods. This isn't a criticism - it's how the enterprise insurance data market has always worked. But for smaller insurers, MGAs, brokers, or proptech firms that want to test before committing, Verisk's procurement process is a barrier Chimnie doesn't impose.
AI training data
Chimnie offers over one billion property images for AI model training, alongside structured datasets designed for machine learning. Verisk doesn't offer a comparable product.
Where Verisk is stronger
Chimnie property data API homepage
Verisk is the better choice when you need deeply calibrated insurance peril models from a provider that's already wired into your underwriting workflow.
The eight peril models are Verisk's standout. They've been refined over years against real claims data and are trusted by some of the UK's largest insurers. If your rating engine already consumes Verisk perils data, switching carries a real cost in model validation and regulatory documentation. Hiscox has called the Data Insight Hub "fundamental to automating our underwriting processes," and Beazley describes Location Matters as "integral to our assessment of risk." Those aren't casual endorsements.
Verisk's relationship with Ordnance Survey - as an official data partner with joint data creation projects - adds weight to its building characteristics data. The August 2024 collaboration to release deeper buildings data for Great Britain is a concrete example.
For the London Market specifically, Sequel's underwriting and claims software handles roughly 40% of Lloyd's business. That's a different product category from property data, but it means Verisk has a presence across the full insurance value chain that no property data bureau, Chimnie included, can match.
Financial scale matters too. A $37 billion company with 55% EBITDA margins isn't going anywhere. For insurers making long-term data infrastructure decisions, counterparty stability counts, and Verisk's balance sheet provides that.
Where Chimnie is stronger
Chimnie is the better choice when data breadth, UK-wide coverage, pricing transparency, and speed of access matter more than entrenched insurer relationships.
Coverage is the first practical difference. Chimnie covers the whole of the UK. Verisk's building data covers Great Britain and Belfast but not the rest of Northern Ireland. If you write policies UK-wide, Chimnie doesn't leave a gap.
The AVM is a clear differentiator. Verisk can tell you what it costs to rebuild a property but not what it's worth on the open market. Chimnie offers both - and the AVM is free for UPRN lookups. For insurers validating sums insured, mortgage brokers pre-screening cases, or portfolio managers tracking asset values, this fills a hole Verisk doesn't address.
Planning data, once live, will give Chimnie a dataset that no other single provider holds nationally. For insurers and lenders, knowing that a property has had a two-storey extension approved - and factoring that into rebuild costs and valuations - addresses a genuine blind spot in current property records.
Chimnie's outbuilding detection and mapping catches structures Verisk's main-dwelling-focused data misses. In insurance, where an unmapped annexe or garden office can mean an underinsured claim, this has direct commercial impact.
Pricing and access
set the two apart structurally. Chimnie's published pricing, free tier, and open API documentation mean you can be running test queries within an hour. Verisk's enterprise sales process typically takes weeks or months. For MGAs, brokers, and proptech firms that need to move fast, this difference in friction matters as much as any feature comparison.
The consumer platform at chimnie.co.uk - with over 150,000 users checking and correcting data about their own properties - creates a feedback loop that continuously validates the underlying datasets. Verisk has no equivalent mechanism for ground-truth validation by actual homeowners.
Who should choose which
Large insurers already embedded in Verisk's ecosystem should probably stay there for peril modelling and building data, particularly if their rating engines are calibrated against Verisk's outputs. But they should evaluate Chimnie as a supplementary data source for AVM, planning data, outbuildings, and pre-fill - use cases Verisk doesn't cover.
Smaller insurers, MGAs, and reinsurers who don't already have Verisk contracts should look seriously at Chimnie. The data breadth is comparable for building characteristics, the risk signals cover a wider range of factors, and the pricing is transparent and accessible. The absence of a multi-month procurement cycle is a practical advantage for organisations that need to move quickly.
Mortgage brokers and sourcing platforms will find Chimnie more relevant. Verisk doesn't offer property valuations, and its enterprise model doesn't suit the broker market. Chimnie's free AVM and per-lookup pricing make it practical to embed a valuation in every advisor conversation.
Property services, proptech firms, and data science teams should start with Chimnie. The API-first delivery, published pricing, training data products, and open documentation make it the more accessible option for product development and integration work.
Lloyd's syndicates and specialty market participants may need Verisk's Sequel software regardless of their property data choice. The two decisions are largely independent.
Conclusion
Verisk and Chimnie aren't interchangeable. Verisk is a global insurance analytics powerhouse with deep peril modelling, enterprise relationships, and a balance sheet that gives it permanence. Chimnie is a UK property data bureau built for breadth, transparency, and accessibility.
The overlap is real - both hold detailed building attributes, both offer rebuild costs, both serve UK insurers - but the gaps in each are where the decision gets made. Verisk doesn't offer an AVM, planning data, outbuilding detection, or self-service access. Chimnie doesn't match Verisk's calibrated peril models or its entrenched position in the workflows of the UK's largest insurers.
For many organisations, using both will make practical sense - Verisk for its established peril models and insurer integrations, Chimnie for AVM, planning data, broader property attributes, and the use cases that fall outside Verisk's insurance-specific scope. Chimnie's pricing is published, the free AVM is live, and the API documentation is open - so working out whether it fits takes minutes, not months.
