How to insure an unoccupied house
If you need to insure an unoccupied house, you need to know this is a specialist insurance product.
This post will explain:
- Why the cover is different to a standard home insurance
- The levels of cover you can buy
- How often property needs to be inspected
- How to insure an unoccupied house
- Unoccupied house insurance is different to standard house insurance in three areas:
How to insure an unoccupied house
The cover is different to standard home insurance in three areas:
Firstly, most home insurers will not wish to insure a house when it is going to be left empty for 30 days or more. Many will add policy conditions, increase the cost or cancel your policy.
There are specialists, like Insuristic, that provide a product designed for unoccupied properties. The cost of this insurance can be much higher than a standard home insurance policy.
Thankfully, you have Insuristic to help. You will find our product is very competitive and would encourage you to take a couple of minutes out to get a quote.
Secondly, the cover for unoccupied properties is different to a standard home insurance.
You have three levels of cover to choose from. The cost of this cover will increase in line with how much risk you are passing on to the insurer.
The three levels of cover are:
- FLEE — only covers claims caused by fire, lightening, earthquake and explosion (FLEE). This is the lowest priced cover.
- Full Cover — is the highest level of cover you can buy. It includes claims claims caused by fire, lightening, earthquake, explosion, subsidence, flood, vandalism, escape of water and theft.
- Full Cover (excluding escape of water) — Is the mid-range cover you can buy. It’s the same cover as ‘Full Cover’ below but excludes claims for escape of water
Thirdly, empty property has a higher risk of claims like burst pipes, theft, fire and vandalism.
For this reason, insurers will want you to inspect the property for signs of an issue often.
If you imagine a burst pipe, the quicker you know about it, the quicker you can stop it and prevent further damage. So it is logical, the more often an empty property is visited, the lower the potential size and cost of a claim.
How often you need to inspect a property isn’t always obvious. You will find the information in your policy wording.
If you fail to the inspection condition in your policy it can cause an issue when it comes to a claim. You will also need to evidence your visits.
For this reason, we recommend you take a couple of pictures every visit.
Top Tip — switch on location services in your mobile phone. That way each image will be time, date and GPS stamped. This will make it easy to show an insurer that you have complied with the inspection condition.
Both Apple and Android have some helpful guides that show you how to switch on location settings.
Insuristic takes a pragmatic approach to inspecting empty property.
The frequency of inspection will depend on how much cover you need. The frequency will increase in-line with the risk you are asking the insurer to take on.
You can find out more about this on our website, but to summarise.
- If you buy FLEE cover, you will need to inspect the property every 28 days.
- If you’ve bought Full Cover excluding escape of water, you will need to inspect the property every 21 days.
- If you buy full cover and you can drain the water systems, you will need to inspect the property every 14 days.
If you need Full Cover and it is not be practical to drain water the systems, we can still help you.
We would need the property to be inspected every 7 days.
You now know how to insure an unoccupied house.
If you want to find out more about our cover, you should check out our unoccupied home insurance guide. The guide goes into more detail and covers additional areas like the security you will need, how to protect your property and how to make a claim.
