HIGHER INSURANCE rates for VACANTS; possible fix with staging?

Would the insurance company have to know?  It always helps if you can leave something in the house just so the buyer can visualize it better... I can tell you that in Florida there is a difference because I pay a higher rate because I am only there about 8 weeks of the year...

Sharon: If a house is vacant for over 30 days ( it varies by state ) the insurance would be void. Vacant would be, no one living in the house. If you have the electricity on and someone stopping by, or furnished. Vacant is vacant and the insurance would not cover if a covered loss would occur. The losses are more freguent in a vacant house for obvious reasons. PS I am also insurance agent. So I deal with this on a daily basis. Especially now with all the vacant houses due to foreclosures.

Sharon - I have just been researching this as I wanted to add a short story about just this topic in my April newsletter. It seems the problem often occurs when the home owners call their insurance agent to take out a home owners policy on their new home - whoops - just let the cat out of the bag that the last home is now vacant - you can't really have two primary residence homeowners policies! Of course, if the vacant home is vandalized or damaged by fire the insurance company is going to know that the house was vacant anyway so its probably not a good idea to hope they don't find out. Furniture does not seem to help - I searched for hours hoping that it would - someone actually has to be living there on a regular basis. There is vacant home insurance but at a price. Home owners need to work with their insurance companies and hope that they will honor their policies for a few months. However, if the policy expires it is going to be really difficult to renew on a vacant property. Not sure this is much help to you.

Stephanie

Sharon, You can have two residences under one policy, if one is a summer home ( vacation home). However, back to the point of vacant or not, you may want to have the homeowner read his or her policy, and like I stated each state is different and it will clearly state the number of days that their policy will consider a property vacant. So you can skirt the issue or not, but if  you have a loss after the number of days stated in the policy, there will be no coverage under that policy. Then they will wonder why the big bad insurance company would not pay. It is never good to hide or skirt the issues when it comes to insurance. Go ahead and pay the higher prices and have the coverages if they are needed. Hope that this helps...

Thanks for bringing this up. Too bad we can't have this important information in writing from at least several of the major insurance underwriters to present to the homeowners at time of listing appointments. It might help to get the property more accurately priced to sell instead of being priced to keep.