Joint freeholder, two flats in building, buildings insurance dilemma

FifiLamar

Hello there are two flats in our house, one occupied by us and one by tenants of our joint freeholder who owns the other flat.
fir the last few years we have been paying, half each, for block of flats insurance, because our neighbour rents out his flat. This has become very expensive and as we don’t rent out our flat, but live here it is frustrating to be paying insurance for the building as if both flats are rented.
Can we get a policy in which we have the whole building, (two flats), insured and our joint freeholder (who we know and get on very well with) can take out his own separate insurance for his flat to cover him for having tenants there?
unfortunately I have left this renewal quite late, despite starting to research before Christmas, and am anxious to find a decent company to insure the building, rather than renew through the broker who has not found a decent deal for us for several years.

DullGreyGuy

Block of Flats Insurance is typically agnostic to if the flats are owner occupied or rented, if you look at a large development of hundreds of flats the freeholder is unlikely to know who's actually occupying each of the units. 

In principle you can both get individual buildings insurance just for your units but you then run a risk that there is a problem with one flat or the others insurance and a major event that impacts both flats that your claim cannot be settled because its dependent on work on the other flat which won't happen because the owner "forgot" to declare their previous bankruptcy or such and they cannot afford the repairs themselves. 

Were you to do this you would be better off changing the leases to move the insurance responsibility onto the leaseholders else you may have problems if the current owner were to sell off their leasehold interests 

Block insurance, as its normally known, is much more expensive than Home insurance because its a form of commercial property insurance which is neither as competitive and buyers are typically no as price sensitive.