Landlord Insurance Essentials: Protecting Your Investment

Being a landlord comes with all sorts of worries. Will the tenants pay their rent on time? Might they damage your property either accidentally or on purpose? And what happens to your investment if any of those scenarios do happen? It’s here that landlord insurance can help – it’s essentially home insurance that’s tailored to cover the particular risks of rental properties.

There are a variety of landlord insurance products available in the market, all designed to offer you peace of mind. You want to safeguard your prized investment against unexpected events and potential financial risks, as they can be significant when you consider the sums of money that can be involved. Ensuring you are protected with landlord insurance will allow you – and your tenants – to sleep more soundly.

Landlord Buildings Insurance

Your landlord buildings insurance policy is probably the most important, as with any house purchase that has a mortgage applied to it. It’s usually a requirement of your buy-to-let mortgage provider since it protects the property from a range of potential risks including full replacement or repair, as well as damage from events such as fire, flood or impact.

Landlord Contents Insurance

Although your tenants will need their own content insurance policy for items they have brought into your property, you should protect the items that you own – particularly in furnished properties – such as furniture, carpets and kitchen equipment.

Pet Damage

To date, landlords who are worried about the potential damage pets might do to their property have been able to refuse requests from tenants to keep pets. But, with the changes within the Renters (Reform) Bill, landlords cannot unreasonably refuse pet requests. This means it’s vital to add pet insurance to cover any potential damage that animals may cause to your property.

Liability Insurance

Liability insurance covers accidents or injuries that happen within your property, either to your tenants or to visitors, and can help in the case of compensation claims if you are legally held responsible.

Property Portfolio Insurance

Juggling multiple policies can be a hassle for landlords of scale. So, if you have five or more properties, a convenient and cost-effective option can be property portfolio insurance which covers all your properties with one premium and one renewal. As well as being less paperwork, it can also work out cheaper this way.

Rent Guarantee Insurance

Given the likelihood that your tenant’s rental payments are used to cover the mortgage on your property, then any shortfall of rent or rent arrears could prove costly for you. Rent guarantee insurance can help you to recover lost rent and cover the costs of legal disputes for repossession and eviction. It will also pay you interim rental payments while the actual rent is recovered.

Home Emergency Cover

Tenants aren’t going to be happy if the boiler suddenly breaks, a pipe bursts or a drain blocks and will be calling on you to fix it and to do so fast. If you are handy with tools and live just around the corner, it’s not a problem. But it’s more likely that you’ll need to do an emergency call out and get a specialist in. This means that paying a small premium to protect yourself from the associated costs is essential.

We Can Help

At Progressive Lets, we are experts in the rental market in the Peterborough area and help landlords find and manage properties within a 50-mile radius. We work with landlords of all sizes, including those who are just starting out, as well as those operating as incorporated businesses and building their portfolios. Get in touch to find out more.