Home insurance, can I get cover as a new customer at renewal time?

1jim

Hi
House insurance renewal time, currently with esure. The price via confused.com is cheaper than the renewal price, I plan to call tomorrow to see if they will price match but am not sure they will as want to make changes such as deleting alarm addition etc, if they won't can I cancel renewal and sign up as new customer?

Mr_K

You certainly can. You only signed up with them for a year, if you wish to start a new contract thats fine - forces you to review your cover as well as get a better quote. Make sure you're not on autorenew - don't think Esure do this unlike a lot of others. I keep swapping between Sheilas Wheels and Esure each year for my home insurance (it's the same company). Not only do I get a better quote, but I go via a cashback site to get a cash bonus (don't go via confused.com - why should they get the commission) and they throw in Free Home Emergency Cover for your first year (which is every year for me )

beefturnmail

The same thing happened to me re my contents insurance. Renewal price with Swinton is 3 times the price I get for a new customer via a screen scraper. If I cancel the auto-renew, can I just go through the screen scraper a a new customer, or will this be 'spotted'? Maybe if I put the policy in my OH's name...?

InsideInsurance

Would be concerned of going via any "screenscraper" these days, insurers and brokers are all now set up for working with aggregators officially so use the likes of Confused.com or CompareTheMarket etc rather than any dodgy screenscraper!

Simply read the terms & conditions before you buy, I dont know any that will block you buying as new customer if their website doesnt fully block you from actually being able to buy.

annie1975_2

Same here, we are with churchill and they quoted well over £200,went online and got it for less than half that.
Rang them up they couldn't match the price but said i could cancel and go online and renew.(silly really).Which we did.

beefturnmail

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Would be concerned of going via any "screenscraper" these days, insurers and brokers are all now set up for working with aggregators officially so use the likes of Confused.com or CompareTheMarket etc rather than any dodgy screenscraper!

By 'screenscraper' I meant e.g. Confused.com and CompareThe Market (i.e. the ones recommended by this site) Are they not a screenscrapers?

InsideInsurance

No, when they first started they used to use screenscraping but all insurers and brokers now have API's exposed for the aggregators to use so they can formally interact with the company and the company controls the mapping of aggregator fields/ responses to the insurer/ brokers own fields/ response options.

One of the big problems of the old screenscraping method was it was the aggregator that decided if "private carpark" mapped to "driveway" or "road" if this wasnt an option on a particular insurers drop down.

You occasionally see a "new" website crop up using screenscraping rather than APIs but these without fail are unauthorised by the FSA and almost certainly unauthorised by the insurers in question which leaves you the consumer in a black hole if you get one of these "translation" issues further down the line

beefturnmail

Thanks that is useful to know. I started using them (and this site) about 8-9 years ago which is probably when they were still 'screenscraping'. Never realised/understood the technical details and nuances of how it actually worked.

InsideInsurance

8-9 years ago is like talking about the dark ages when your considering the world of the internet