The Protection Offered By Buy To Let Insurance For Landlords
It’s possible to become a landlord almost by accident and not even realise that buy to let insurance for landlords may be required.
How might you become a landlord without even knowing it?
If you begin to rent your home or property then it is classed as being commercial and you need to take out buy to let insurance for landlords. That is a big threshold to cross and it changes a great deal of the aspects of the risks faced by you and your property.
So, even if you decide to start renting out a room to help with your day-to-day expenses or just letting out your property while you’re away on holiday, you may find that by default you’ve just become a landlord.
If you’re wondering exactly what the big deal is with that, well, from an insurance viewpoint it means that as a rule you’ll need a different type of cover – landlords insurance!
The problem is that your property faces a whole raft of risks that it typically won’t have faced when it was owner-occupied. Just a sample of some of these might include:
· damage caused by tenants caused by wilful neglect;
· damage or vandalism caused while the property is empty in-between lettings;
· injury to tenants while they are staying in the property.
The reality is that you’ll have a tenant or tenants and that usually makes a change to everything for an insurance viewpoint. Any existing home buildings and contents insurance you have will typically become invalid and it may be highly advisable to look at buy to let insurance for landlords if you’d like to protect your interests.
Insurance for landlords is typically a little more expensive than owner-occupier cover because it is providing cover for more varied risks. It is also important to note that policy features and benefits may vary among the different landlord insurance policies, meaning that what is covered by one insurer may not be covered by another. Checking what the cover entails can make sense.
Of course, if you change the use of your property from owner-occupied to rented-out then your existing insurance company may not realise that if you don’t tell them.
In the event of a claim though, insurance providers do have techniques available for checking just who was occupying it at the time and on what basis. Finding out that it was being used for rental purposes will typically invalidate the existing policy and cause the rejection of the claim.
Given the relatively small additional costs involved, full buy to let insurance for landlords is generally a small price to pay for having the additional peace of mind!
