Unoccupied property insurance

JennyDiver

Forum members might be interested in two UPI quotes recently received for an empty, unoccupied one bedroom bungalow in a London suburb at a rebuilding cost of £300K and against the following perils :- fire, lightning, earthquake, explosion, aircraft.

Towergate Insurance Ltd. - 3 months £610 or 6 months £1074, one off payment and no refund for cancellation within term, property inspection required weekly.

UkinsuranceNet.com – 1 year £622, premiums payable monthly and cancellable at any time, property inspection required monthly.

No contest really, is there?

paddyandstumpy

If you're just driven by price, the second one is an obvious choice.

But it's an unknown name, poor quality website littered with typo's, personally I'd pay more for peace of mind elsewhere.

JennyDiver

Ah, the power of a neat website, eh paddyandstumpy!

UKinsuranceNet was entirely “unknown” to me too until I used them before, about two years ago. This is the trading name of Internet Insurance Services Ltd of Darlington. It is my impression (although I may be quite wrong here) that they are a smallish broking company more concerned with having a good panel of insurers offering a wide and realistic range of quotations rather than a Super Insurance Corporation with faultless, glossy, swish advertising and website.

Their “Claims Team” is, in fact, Ryan Direct Group which, coincidentally, seems to have been taken over 18 months ago by the financial backers of Towergate Insurance - see via a Google search (since, as a relative newbie, I'm not allowed to post a URL!)

The insurance business is a confusing maze of brokers, claims services, underwriting groups and insurance companies, who are quite capable of packaging up “risks” and re-insuring them with others, a bit like collateralised debt obligations (remember them!).

The actual insurers of my policy are Legal & General Insurance Ltd and ERGO Versicherung AG (UK Branch), both rather well “known”, and the policy wording is pretty standard.

Of course, I did the due diligence bit beforehand, including scanning this forum for suitable companies. I tried several, including Towergate which has got itself something of a reputation here for unoccupied property insurance, and just presented the extreme ends of the quotations. By all means, if you’re put off by some website typos, pay the extra!!

Reardoa

Typos put me off as well. If they cant get the basics right how can you trust what they are doing? We tend to use specialists such as Vasek and U-Sure.

JennyDiver

Intrigued by the above comment about “a poor website littered with typos”, I went back for another look, although I tend to use websites just to get the ‘phone numbers, since it’s quicker than faffing about with online forms and there’s an actual person to address unclear issues. But it turns out that the UkinsuranceNET website is rather more extensive and informative that that for Towergate (whose quotation appeared to be from just one underwriter) with profiles of some 80 insurance companies with whom they do business, including Towergate. I didn’t find any typos, but then that may just be because I got tired of looking for them. Maybe paddyandstumpy were looking at another site altogether.

Thanks Reardoa for the two tips. U-sure operate via brokers and, on contacting their recommendation, he found that they weren’t interested because the property had been “unoccupied” i.e. not lived in overnight, for about thirteen years (more on this shortly) and the best he could do was offer a quote from one of the larger groups for £905 per year.

This property has been in the news recently – find on Google using the exact search term “Andrew Fraser sewer rat”. It belonged to my late aunt, who was in a nursing home, was fully furnished and had been carefully looked after by me and my sister, with the heating and lighting controlled by time clocks for eleven years. Unhappily, Fraser, one of the brothers in the “heir hunter” firm Fraser and Fraser, got his hands on the property by improper means two years ago and then disconnected all services. Despite this history, UkinsuranceNET were happy to quote and so was Vasek’s online form, since they don’t do business on the ‘phone. Others, apparently, have rather strict and inflexible terms and aren’t interested in exceptions to their “unoccupied” definitions.

Vasek quoted 3 months at £120.14 or 6 months at £230.04 or 12 months at £444.61

This is less than UkinsuranceNET and both are hugely better than Towergate, so many thanks Reardoa. This is exactly what forums should be about!!

Reardoa

Pleasure JennyDiver

JennyDiver

In the end, because of their cancellable monthly premiums, I went with UKinsuranceNET. So :-

Insurance Broker 1
Finance Company 1
Claims Company 1
Insurance Companies 2

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5 companies

Thrugelmir

Is the cover offered identical? Any excess impositions.

JennyDiver

The excess on both is £250, pretty insignificant considering the cover, and the other terms are comparable, including frequency of inspection.