The impact of bushfires can be devastating for families and individuals, particularly when it comes to damage or loss of their homes. The free Bushfire Resilience Rating Home Self-Assessment app, funded by the Australian Government, helps households assess their site-specific risk and take action to improve their resilience to bushfire.

App improving bushfire resilience of Australian households

An average of 1,000 Australians have downloaded the Bushfire Resilience Rating Home Self-Assessment app each week since it was launched in October 2023. To date, that’s over 18,000 households from 274 bushfire prone local government areas across the nation.

In addition to providing information that supports households to increase the bushfire resilience of their homes, the app also helps put downward pressure on insurance premiums and mortgage interest rates.

NAB is the first bank to come on board with an interest rate incentive for households participating in the Bushfire Resilience Rating home retrofit progams with the Resilient Building Council (RBC).

Bushfire Resilience Rating Home Self-Assessment app making properties safer

Decades of science are utilised in the Bushfire Resilience Rating Home Self-Assessment app, allowing householders to assess how well their home would perform in a bushfire event. The app provides a free customised action plan, specific to individual properties and local risk. As tasks are completed, the home’s Resilience Rating is updated – allowing people to immediately see the positive impact on their Rating.

Community members who’ve used the app are already seeing the benefits:

“The Bushfire Resilience Rating Home Self-Assessment app is an excellent tool to start the process to make our properties safer and encourage property owners to be proactive and realistic. It helps to keep our properties maintained and ready for disasters,” says app user Alexandra Smidt.

“Our personal experience from protecting our property from two major fires during Sampson Flat and Ash Wednesday, is that landscaping and building maintenance helped us in protecting and ultimately saving our property. The app report has helped us identify things we hadn’t yet considered,” says the Bushfire Resilience Rating Home Self-Assessment app user Alan Williams.

“The Bushfire Resilience Rating Home Self-Assessment app is quite fantastic. The report helped us identify some shrubs close to the windows and a wooden attached structure that were a serious threat. We’re feeling better now we know what to do to improve our resilience, and we started taking action the same day,” says app user Dominic Hyde.
 

Households wishing to participate in RBC’s home retrofit program and access the NAB discount can find out more here.