Holiday Home Insurance and Second Home Insurance
Protecting your holiday home either overseas or in the UK is a vital way to protect your investment. Choosing a UK insurance product means that you will have peace of mind, when it comes to having to make a claim.Selecting the "get a quote" button will direct you to Intasure.
Posts Tagged ‘holiday home cover’
Choosing your overseas property insurance quote
Choosing your overseas property insurance quote may be a bewildering experience. Your quest for the most suitable and appropriate second home cover to meet your needs might run something along the following lines:
Point of sale
Even when you were purchasing the overseas property there could well have been countless local agents eager to make a sale of the relevant home insurance. That’s all well and good, since the protection of suitable insurance is something many buyers will want. Local agents, of course, are likely to stress their knowledge and familiarity with the local market, insurance practices and requirements.
But will your own language skills and local knowledge really be up to negotiating an insurance claim in a foreign land if your property or its contents should suffer loss or damage?
UK-based overseas property insurance quote
Instead, you decide that you’d feel a lot more comfortable discussing your needs (and, if it were to come to it, conducting any claim) in English, with a UK-based insurance provider.
One brief search of the internet and you are likely to find that you are still spoilt for choice among the many UK-based insurers bidding for the business and offering to supply an overseas property insurance quote. Many will stress their extensive experience in arranging buildings and contents insurance of UK homes and try to impress you with the speed and ease of the claims service when it is needed.
But what of their experience and knowledge of insuring holiday homes overseas, you might ask.
The specialist
As your search is narrowed down still further, you might be fortunate enough to discover those specialist providers specifically geared up to offer you an overseas property insurance quote. These are the insurance providers who have made it their particular business to meet the needs of UK-based owners of homes abroad. These are the providers who combine a knowledge of property in foreign markets with an understanding of what the holiday home owner really needs.
A place in the sun: Spanish property insurance
In buying a holiday home in Spain you are likely to be more or less guaranteed your place in the sun. Since protecting that investment may be high on your list of priorities, Spanish property insurance is not something you’d wish to gloss over. A little homework and the choice of an experienced and knowledgeable specialist insurer in this area might help you avoid some of the common pitfalls:
• second home buildings insurance: just as at home, buildings insurance is designed to cover the cost of completely rebuilding your property in Spain if it is reduced to rubble in a major catastrophe. Exactly what risks will your home be insured against? Does the buildings insurance take full account of the particular materials used in the construction of your Spanish home and does it reflect all the requirements of local building regulations?
• contents insurance: are there restrictions on the extent of cover provided? Theft, loss and damage might seem to convey more or less universal meanings, but are there specific definitions of these risks which limit the amount of cover afforded the contents of your home in Spain?
• unoccupied property: what about those times of the year when your holiday home remains empty? Is an adequate level of Spanish property insurance cover maintained during these times? Are there any special measures or additional security precautions that the insurer will require you take in order to safeguard the property and mitigate risks when it is left unoccupied?
• lettings: if you are planning to let your holiday home, you are almost certainly obliged to inform your insurers of that fact. To what extent, if any, does the level or extent of your holiday home insurance alter during those let periods?
• owner’s liability: many holiday home owners employ at least one person to come to the house to clean it, make repairs or do general caretaking. Have you made provision for your liabilities as their employer? What provision does your Spanish property insurance include for loss, breakages or damage caused to your home or its contents by such employees?
Holiday home cover to suit you
There are many reasons for buying a holiday home: it might be in a part of the country where you enjoy taking occasional breaks away from your principal residence; it might be the setting for holidays for you, your friends or family; it might be bought for you to move into when you retire; or it might be an investment from which you intend to earn a regular income from rent. However you look forward to enjoying the property, though, you are likely to want to protect both the building and its contents with suitable holiday home cover.
The building
The fabric of the property is exposed to all of the perils of any other building: namely, fire, flooding, storm damage, vandalism and impacts from such things as falling trees, telegraph poles, aerials and the like. The difference with holiday home cover, however, is that it is probably going to need to extend such cover during significant periods of time when the property lies empty and unoccupied.
These are times when many insurers grow distinctly nervous about covering the property and most reduce the level of cover after it has been empty for between 30 and 90 days (depending on the insurer). Specialist holiday home insurance providers, however, are likely to be more accustomed to customers needs to maintain cover at an acceptable level even when the property is unoccupied, but is very important that you always check what an insurers’ stance on unoccupied properties are rather than just making an assumption..
The contents
The contents of your holiday home might not be as extensive or as valuable as the contents of your principal residence, but they if even just a few items become damaged or are stolen, then they are likely to be expensive to replace. Once again, specialists in the provision of holiday home insurance are likely to be in a position to ensure that valuable contents remain protected the year round, even at those times when the property is unoccupied.
Insurance to suit you
Because your home away from home is likely to have a number of potential uses and occupation patterns, standard “one size fits all” insurance solutions are unlikely to offer exactly the cover that you need. You might then be exposed to the risk of under-insurance (if certain elements remain unprotected) or over-insurance (if you end up paying for cover that you really do not need). Specialist holiday home cover is likely to offer the kind of tailored solution appropriate for your own holiday retreat.