Home Insurance Inspections

Frontline: Renters insurance vital for students

In late June the 10-year battle over instituting a rental licensing and inspection program came to a halt when the City Council voted down the proposal. One concern was increasing costs on small-business landlords during an economic recession;  landlords would be responsible for the cost of making homes that violate health and safety laws suitable to live in. Without a licensing program, students renting in Bellingham can, and should, protect their belongings by purchasing renters insurance. The victims of the most recent rental fire in Bellingham did not have insurance and they paid the price for it. The same happened in the December fire that destroyed the home of three Western students on East Maple Street.

Home insurance and the new wave of inspections | Financial ...

If you go back to the time you bought your first home, there was very little fuss or bother. You just handed over your money, hopefully received a copy of the policy, and then forgot about insurance until renewal. At this point, we come to an interesting statistic. Historically, most people renew with the same company. Only an average of about 10% change insurers in any given year. So most people have little or no contact with their insurers unless they are unlucky enough to suffer a loss.

This is all changing. All around the country, insurers are sending out letters warning their insured that teams of inspectors will be visiting to assess the exterior condition of their homes. In plain language, for once, the insurers also warn they reserve the right to cancel the policy if they find the condition of your home “unacceptable” for some reason. This has caused some annoyance in many homes because there’s an obvious linkage with current events. Looking around at the recent bad weather, a lot of people suspect the insurers are looking for ways to reduce their risk in future storms and hurricanes. Homes that were acceptable without inspection twenty years ago, may now be rejected because the inspectors don’t think you have been maintaining your property.

So what exactly is going to happen? In the first instance, this is going to be an external evaluation. Insurers do have the right to come into your home to look around but, there’s no sign any are proposing to use this right on a casual basis. Presumably, it will be as a follow-up should the external inspection cause concern. This review could actually affect you in two quite different ways. First, you have a general duty to tell the insurer if anything significant has changed in the property since you first took out the policy. So, for example, if you have built a garage or obviously improved the property, you should have told the insurer. This affects the rebuild valuation. Indeed, you should be doing your own review of rebuilding costs every two years. You will be surprised how quickly the cost of labor and materials rises. A failure to keep the valuation up-to-date is one of the grounds on which an insurer can cancel a property.

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