In recent decades, the seismic assessment of existing buildings has developed significantly from traditional objectives that focused on ensuring life safety of the building to more advanced metrics that consider the potential economic losses. Italy has made notable developments in this regard with the introduction of the so-called Sismabonus seismic risk assessment guidelines. These guidelines consider these more advanced metrics of performance and use vast amounts of existing data following past earthquakes and specialised studies. They offer a simple and practitioner-oriented approach to widespread application. Further analysis has shown that when scrutinised with respect to more exhaustive loss estimation methods, the simplified approaches adopted within Sismabonus may possess some limitations and drawbacks. Recent research, however, has shown that with some modest adjustments and modifications, these simplified methods can be notably improved without any penalty in applicability in a practitioner setting. This paper discusses some of these recent developments in tools and approaches and describes how they may be integrated in future revisions of risk assessment guidelines.