Buildings Insurance

When you own property for the first time and you are not familiar with the costs, they can seem never ending! Once the mortgage is set up and in place you may feel some relief, but remember all the other costs with owning a property besides the mortgage.

These include of course various forms of insurance, and one of the most important of these is called buildings insurance.

In fact, to get the mortgage in the first place it will be a condition that you have buildings insurance and you will not find any sane lender willing to offer you a mortgage if you have not insured the bricks and mortar!

If you are a freeholder of the property then it is entirely up to you to ensure that there is buildings insurance in place, if you are a leaseholder then the freeholder is the one responsible and so you must ensure that the cover is indeed in place.

Building insurance costs (premiums) can vary significantly based on a number of factors. Obviously if you were to live in an earthquake hot spot zone (luckily not a problem in the UK!) then you would have much higher premiums than elsewhere, but there are various geographical disadvantages that can add to premiums, for instance if there are problems with flooding or you live alongside the edge of a river that has been known to burst its banks from time to time.

There are also other factors that can affect buildings insurance, and if you are renting out the property for instance then it is seen as a higher risk usually and as we all know, higher risk means higher costs, however if this means that you are still insured and covered it is worth paying, as the last thing you want is to invalidate your policy by not actually living there and finding that the insurance won't pay out if you have tenants and something untoward happens.

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