Home insurance problems as close to river

mariadingbat

We are having awful problems getting home insurance and I could use some advice. Our renewal quote is £1500 this year, which seems huge!

We are 40m away from a river and part of the same postcode is built right on the riverbank and on a flood plain. There was a flood 25 years ago, before all the houses and river defences were built but nothing since. Despite this, most insurance companies won't even provide a quote and any of the ones that do are 2K or more, I was only able to get the current quote of 1.5K by removing the flood element and increasing both excess to £900. Any advice on where I could look for policies would be appreciated.  

Annemos

There seems to be a difference between homes built before or after 2009. Would this help at all?  


https://www.biba.org.uk/find-insurance/?find-insurance-type=41&ref=&flood_re_eligibility=2&pageNumber=1


This also has information: 

https://www.gocompare.com/home-insurance/flooding-and-home-insurance/

DullGreyGuy

Try the insurers listed on https://www.floodre.co.uk/find-an-insurer/ 

Which council tax band is your home in (and which country)? Assuming its not a Group H (or I in Wales) the flood cover should only be costing £180-£480 plus their calculated cost of the £250 retention 

mariadingbat

Thanks everyone, I've tried going through floodre and go compare most of the insurers say they can't provide a quote or else they're coming in at 1.6K minimum. It's incredibly frustrating as we used to live one street over and a quote for that address for the same size house is coming in at £600. AXA, AA, Aviva, Co-op, Halifax, LV, John Lewis and the post office won't even quote, M&S is 2K. I was able to get the flood portion of the insurance taken off our existing policy but it only reduced the quote by £247. 

BarelySentientAI

If removing flood cover barely changed the price, that suggests that the risk of flooding didn't drive the large increase.

dunstonh

We are having awful problems getting home insurance and I could use some advice. Our renewal quote is £1500 this year, which seems huge!

Everything needs context.  Your quote is half what I pay.  So, to me, yours seems small.

Thanks everyone, I've tried going through floodre and go compare most of the insurers say they can't provide a quote or else they're coming in at 1.6K minimum. It's incredibly frustrating as we used to live one street over and a quote for that address for the same size house is coming in at £600. AXA, AA, Aviva, Co-op, Halifax, LV, John Lewis and the post office won't even quote, M&S is 2K. 

These are basic plans aimed at the mainstream.  They effectively cherry pick the easy stuff and don't like the more complicated.    

Have you used a local broker or specialist broker yet?   i.e. the old fashioned way.   NFU may be worth considering as they underwrite on more unusual properties.  However, their target market isn't really someone looking for basic coverage.  

mariadingbat

NFU won't quote unfortunately, they got to the end of the quote and said that my address is flagged as red for flood risk and they can't insure me. 
It's a standard construction 4 bed townhouse, never flooded, no extensions or outbuildings. A similar building one street away is only £600 to insure. It's very frustrating. 

DullGreyGuy

You could speak to a traditional broker, but there aren't that many that cater for standard home insurance, there is so little margin that you need to remove every penny of cost you can to be competitive and so most have repositioned to the High Value space where people value quality over price. 

They may be able to get some prices for you, especially if you can evidence flood defences being put in since the last flooding and no flooding since but quotes that involve people reading documents etc come with a cost to cover their time and the fact that only x% of quotes turn into paid policies. 

sheramber

Our local community hall is insured by NFU for  1 million pounds.

When asked to insure a dvd cinema system in the hall they refused as the property was X mtrs from the river.

But there is a very larger flood plain along the river , then a field slopping upward to the road, the width of the road, and another gradient up to the hall. If water reached the hall there would be an incredible depth of water and a cinema system would be the least of worries.

But they only measure the straight line distance.

They  stand to risk 1 million pounds for the hall, plus every Croft on that side of the glen,  but not the few thousand for the projector and screen.