Forum Archive: Insurance

We are a five floor coop appx 6000 sq ft. in total. Built in late 19th c. with a fair amount of architectural detail.

How do we determine how much to insure for? I suppose the question is : what is the going rate for cost of replacement per square foot?

Marlene

Soon to be owner of a two-family brownstone in PS and am going through the process of securing homeowner’s insurance. I’ve read the posts in the forum re: recommendations for contacts – that’s not what I’m interested in. I’m hoping those more educated in these matters can tell me what type of coverage (and associated limits) I should be looking at. Will have a tenant in garden rental.

Thanks all!

I just added a wood burning fire place to my Brooklyn townhouse. Well I didn’t add it from scratch per se, I knocked out some brick and reactivated a pre-existing flu, and the re-bricked the frame. When I bought the house there was no active fire place. I had my contractors do the work. Is there any change in terms of my home owner’s insurance? Do i need to report it to them?

We are purchasing a house to renovate and need to show hazard insurance in order to close on the house. The house is liveable but practically in estate condition so we are doing a new gut reno. My insurance is asking whether it will be vacant and if repairs are cosmetic and I’m nervous about explaining the renovation. What do people do in this situation?

Seems like a lot of insurance companies are not insuring COOPS on Shore RD in Bay Ridge due to it being close to the water which I think is BS. Chubbs is the only insurance and the rates were $1100 a year for a basic min coverage. Anyone know a company or have a solution?

I am a roofing consultant on large commercial claims. The company that hired me asked me to sit on a conference call with Chubb Ins. The lead adjuster stated that in order to get competitive bids, he regularly pays contractors for estimates. Is this a ethics violation in Wisconsin? Sounds like he is trying to stake the deck against the preferred contractor.

I am currently looking for homeowner’s insurance for a brownstone in Bed-Stuy. Right now, the two frontrunners are Libery Mutual and State Farm. I also looked at Chubb, but the premium was way higher than the other quotes I got, and from what I read on the other forum posts it seems that they tend to overvalue the replacement cost of the house. There are relatively few differences between the coverage offered by Liberty Mutual and State Farm, but LM’s premium is about $400 higher. Does anyone know if there is any difference in dealing with one insurance company over the other? Is one better at handling claims? Would love to know everyone’s thoughts. I am open to suggestions on other insurance providers as well.

We’re buying a weekend home in CT, and it just occurred to us that we could now change our car registration, legally and legitimately, to CT and thus pay lower insurance rates. Any reason not to do this? Given that Brooklyn is our primary home and we’ll be spending more of our time here, is there any advantage to keeping our NY registration?

Thanks for any insights!

I know there have been several posts about this in the past, but I’m hoping to get some more recent data. We are hopefully closing on a North Slope house in the next month or so, and we’ve been getting quotes for homeowner’s insurance. The ones we have so far seem really, really high — $8,300/year from Chartis and over $10,000 from Fireman’s Fund. The house is a legal two family (although we’re planning to use it as a one family) and has about 3,400 square feet over 4 floors. Each quote is based on a $2.1MM replacement cost for the house and includes an umbrella policy of either $3MM or $5MM. I know there’s less expensive stuff out there (e.g., Everest), but I’ve read some pretty negative reviews. I guess I thought the better policies would be in the $5,000 to $6,000 range, not $8,000 to $10,000. Any thoughts?