The income you get from your rental property may be very important to you. Safeguarding the continuity of this income may be a whole lot easier if you have adequate landlord building insurance in place.

The reason for this is fairly simple. If there is a problem in your property caused by something like flood, storm, fire etc and it has to stand empty while repairs or renovations are being carried out then you won’t be getting any rental income.

If you have no landlord building insurance at all, then you will be faced with finding the cost of repairs yourself as well as having to suffer the loss of rental income.

Worse still, if someone is injured as a result of your property, tripping on a loose floorboard or being hit by a falling roof slate for example, then they could sue you for damages. Without property owners’ liability protection (which is included in many landlord building insurance policies), you may be facing a ruinous claim for damages

Insurance for buy to let property may help you cope with these eventualities.

Standard house insurance won’t do

Standard house insurance may provide many of the same basic areas of cover as buy to let house insurance and you may find that it is a little cheaper. Landlord building insurance though, has to take additional risks into account and this wider cover does tend to mean that premiums may be higher.

Using private house insurance for a rental property will invalidate any claim made and may make it more difficult to find insurance cover in the future. This typically also applies even in a property that is part rented out.

Additional risk 1

Compared to a standard buildings and contents insurance policy, one of the main additional risks from a landlords insurance point of view is the tenant.

Your tenants are not going to take the same care of your property and the contents of your property as you would yourself, and some may even wilfully cause damage. Excluding the risk of malicious damage by tenants to one side (which some select insurers – including ourselves – do cover), if your tenants do not care for your property as they would their own you run risks such as:

• small faults may be left unattended to until they can be ignored no longer and what could have been easily fixed may turn into an expensive claim;
• the drip from the water pipe becomes a puddle that turns into a flood;
• the small tear on the sofa cushion or on the curtains that gets bigger and bigger until the item needs to be replaced etc.

Additional risk 2

When you rent out a property, you may have to acknowledge that it may be empty from time to time.

You could be carrying out repairs or renovations or just be waiting for new tenants to move in. In either case, when a property is empty it can often become a target for vandals and thieves or suffer from significant damage if a problem like a broken window goes unnoticed for too long.

Properties that are going to be empty for a long period of time (usually around 30 days, though this can vary among BTL insurance providers) will need vacant property insurance (also known as unoccupied property insurance). Failure to do so could see the cover offered under your existing rented property insurance being significantly reduced or even invalidated.

What’s right for you

Getting the most suitable level of buy to let landlord building insurance cover for you is important as it allows you to react to and resolve problems as quickly as possible to minimise rental loss. The success of your business may depend on it.