I had an insurance agent in my office this morning talking about the benefits to packaging all rental units insurance with one company, Great Northwest Insurance, a B+ rated company.
This would be one big policy covering all the rental units. Payments could be made monthly, quarterly or annually.
The agency, not the company, would have underwriting authority and could also pay faster on most claims.
Currently our insurance is with a bunch of different carriers–Foremost, Colonial General, Farmer’s, USAA, etc.
Do any of you have experience with Great Northwest or with packaging (bundling) your rental house insurance coverages?
We have one agent locally who is a GuideOne agent, but also writes for other companies. We started with GuideOne here because they were very affordable. As we were buying house #9, we found out GuideOne has a limit of 8 investment properties per owner. The next best thing we found was Foremost. So the rest of them are still with the same agent, but under Foremost.
Each property is on its own policy, billed separately, etc. We were going to try and package several of them once under a single commercial policy because she thought it would save us money and then we could put more of them under GuideOne, but it didn’t turn out to be any cheaper for us. Plus, they were kinda picky for the package deal. They’d only take houses with central heat and air. I think there were some other requirements too.
We have a good bit of our personal stuff with USAA. They just won’t work with entities for anything (insurance, loans, etc). They’re awesome otherwise.
Thanks for the reply, Justin. Sort of sounds like our situation, USAA covers 1 residence and 1 rental only, plus the cars. They’re good to deal with but a little expensive?
I’m waiting for a call back from the local GuideOne agent, who wants to use Northwest instead. Foremost upped the policy prices a lot after we had a hail claim. They also put a $2500 deductible on each little roof. The deductible would be the cost to re-roof.
Otherwise I don’t like to mess with insurance, it seems like it only goes up if you try to switch companies.
You can set up a captive insurance company if your operation is big enough. You will see significant cost savings and never have to worry about coverage ever again.
The agent has now signed us up for new insurance with Great Northwest for a $300+ annual savings, and much better coverage. Now we have rental loss, and contents insurance plus a million in liability. Plus roof coverage. We go with a $1,000 deductible on our insurance policies to keep premiums lower.
It was worth it to make a phone call and get new coverage. Since the agent makes the evaluation of the property there shouldn’t be a cancellation due to a drive-by.