Unoccupied Home and Homeowners Insurance

So if you are not too far from home come back every 29 days for one night.

Or have friend or family visit on occasion.

Read your policy or actually talk to your agent rather than relying on stories you've read and other gossip.

I suggest you look at your policy and/or talk with your agent. Typically it would be contained in the exclusions section. Many dwelling fire policies have a restriction that it doesn't pay for theft claims if the dwelling (rental unit) is left unoccupied for anywhere from 30-60 days. Homeowners policies aren't usually as restrictive.

I appreciate your reply.

wa8yxm wrote:
So if you are not too far from home come back every 29 days for one night.

This could get real expensive if workamping across the country. Might as well pay the premium increase.

wa8yxm wrote:
. . . have friend or family visit on occasion.

I've read that claims can and have been investigated to determine the occupancy and a night occupied by someone other than the owner(s) is not sufficeint.

We faced this same situation when we decided to move from one house (when zoning said I could no longer park my camper on MY property). We purchased a house in a totally different county where we could park the camper.

Meanwhile, we had the problem with the first house as it sat empty. The house still had a mortgage on it, so we had to carry insurance.

Solution? We let our adult son live in the house free. His only requirement was to pay his own utilities, which we kept in our name, but he paid. We never told the insurance company anything different, until the house sold under a land contract agreement, and then everything turned into a nightmare. (but that is another story.)

If you have someone that can live in the house, who you trust, that is really the best option.

Edit:
I just remember... we used the same insurance company for both houses. But (AllState) said we could only insure one house as a primary residence and warned us they were going to cancel the old house, since we were living in the new one.

We negotiated with our agent, and the solution was to insure the old house with a home-owners-renters policy, which protected the house no matter who lived in it. The policy did not cover someone elses contents, it did cover the house and any damage for XXX number of reasons, including vandalism from the renter. Yes, the premium was higher, but we had no choice.

azdryheat wrote:
Read your policy or actually talk to your agent rather than relying on stories you've read and other gossip.

exactly every state and every insurance company have different ideals In BC Canada as long as waters is off and house has someone relegated to checking on it once and awhile its no problem and not any extra
talk directly to your agent and see what they tell you before doing anything and besides if it is a little more > how much more most home policy's on the average house are only 4 or 5hundred to begin with

Most Ins. Co. Consider a home occupied if the contents are there. A vacant home is one that has no contents. Call your Agent and ask.

In Alabama our insurance jumped from $50.00 a month to $175.00 a month for unoccupied insurance. And this policy was written by a third party insurance company.... We looked at all of the alternatives and paying the increased coverage was the only option that would allow me to sleep at night.

Not a problem if you talk to your agent when you get your policy. Lots of people have two homes and one of them regularly sits longer than 30 days. We had no problem and did not pay a rate much higher than normal for a vacation house that we only used about 4 weeks a year.

USAFBILL wrote:
In Alabama our insurance jumped from $50.00 a month to $175.00 a month for unoccupied insurance. And this policy was written by a third party insurance company.... We looked at all of the alternatives and paying the increased coverage was the only option that would allow me to sleep at night.

This is exactly what I've read in several (non-gossip) places. To top that off, our homeowners insurance is very difficult to obtain as we have a manufactured home and our premium is already over $100 a month. If our result is even close to that of USAFBILLs then our premium would be over $350 a month. We're not even well heeled enough to absorb that into our budget.

I have a request to have our agent call me back so we can get the straight poop on our policy.