Buildings and Contents Insurance

Buildings and Contents Insurance

Nobody likes spending money for no good reason. If you own one or more properties which you let out to others then your main goal is to make money. What you really don’t want to do is to end up out of pocket through no fault of your own. The buildings and contents insurance policy that you end up choosing may well be very useful to you as a landlord.

Insurance cover is important for any property owner. It doesn't matter if you only own the home you live in or whether you are a landlord with many different properties in your portfolio. If you don’t have buildings and contents insurance cover in place then you may have to pay for anything that happens out of your own pocket. The aim of insurance policies is, after all, to give you the chance to get financial protection in case certain things go wrong.

The fact is that you can’t expect your tenants to insure stuff for you. Happy as they may be to take out their own policies for their personal possessions, they have no obligation to insure the building that they rent off you or any contents that you have put there for their use.

Think for a moment about what the costs of not having buildings and contents insurance might be if something goes wrong with your rental property. For example:

• How much would you have to pay if you fell out with your tenants (and it does happen) and they decided to trash your property before they moved out?
• How much would it cost you if your tenant accidentally left the bath running and the water caused damage to the ceiling underneath the bathroom and to your furniture in that room?
• How much would restoration costs be if you had a fire that gutted your property and that stopped your rental income for a period of time?
• How much would you have to find if your tenant knocked over the TV you left in the property and you had to have it replaced?

The point is that buildings and contents insurance could help you cover these and many other costs. The aim of these policies is to help you cope with the unexpected, with accidents and even sometimes with malicious damage. After all, none of us can predict when things might go wrong but it is always nice to have help at hand if they do.