High Valued Home Insurance California

Most homeowners can pick up the phone and request a quote from their local Insurance Agent or Insurance Broker when looking for a competitive quote for their home insurance. However, if you are a homeowner who falls into the category of owning a high valued home that has a lot of square footage (usually 4,000 square foot or more) or you built or bought a custom home that has high end materials throughout the property you will want to contact an Insurance Agent who specializes in high valued home insurance.

What most consumers don't know can end up hurting them. Most of your common insurance carriers have limited insurance capacity when insuring your property or liability. What this means is they have a maximum cap as to the insurable value they are willing or able to cover your property and liability. For instance many insurance companies who write in California will not allow the insurance agent to provide more than $2,000,000 in property coverage. In order to the insurance agent to obtain higher property coverage they would have to obtain approval from the home insurance carrier and many times they will not approve it. This leaves the insurance agent with the choice to either sell you a policy with inadequate limits or tell you they are not able to offer you insurance coverage.

The other issue you as a consumer are faced with is an insurance agent who does not use the correct replacement cost estimate for your home. Most of the time these Insurance Agents will calculate the replacement cost at the typical calculations based on a "normal home" they typically write. This is because they are unaware how to calculate replacement cost for your custom home. For a typical Southern California home we will typically use $265 to $325 per square foot as a baseline for replacement cost. However, for a high valued homeowner is may be appropriate to use $600 to $1,200 per square foot for the replacement cost estimate. I remember talking with one of our clients who had stone imported from another country and that stone cost in excess of one million dollars. This was just the material cost and did not include the labor cost to install the stone. If we had used the typical replacement cost estimate for our calculations we would have grossly underinsured the property.

The other issues homeowners face is when you purchase one of these homes and are unaware of the true cost to replace one of the materials that were imported from another country and put into the home you just recently purchased. One of the great things about a high valued home insurance carrier is they will inspect both the exterior and interior of your home. These individuals are able to identify these special features and will bring them to your attention. They will also help identify personal property that you own that the Agent might have missed from our conversations. For instance you might have an art collection that could be worth thousands of dollar. They can help identify these items in order to make sure you are insured correctly.

Not only do high valued home insurance carriers offer much higher building coverages that can equal tens of millions of dollars they also include much broader coverages within the homeowners policy. These coverages can include higher mold abatement coverage, broader legal defense coverages allowing for duel defense, and higher water damage limits just to name a few. Because the insurance carrier is sending out an inspector to your home both parties are coming to a full agreement on the true value of your property. This ensures the insurance carrier is not able to decrease the payout at the time of the claim assuming a total loss happens due to a fire.

Many high valued home insurance carriers will require that the client also include other lines of coverages as they are not wanting to just write the home. Some of these coverage include your Auto Insurance, Earthquake Insurance, a fine arts policy, flood insurance, and umbrella policy just to name a few. Each of these coverages can provide additional layer of discounts that can help bring down the overall cost of the insurance. The auto policy that are included with these specialty insurance carrier will typically include broader coverage to include an agreed value of your auto verses a actual cash value.

When you become an informed consumer you help to ensure you are obtaining the best coverage for your specific situation. We are here to help our clients who own a high valued home protect not only their home but also the lifestyle that have grown accustomed to.