Hopefully, your buy to let property may contribute a significant amount of money to your income. Landlord building insurance may help you keep that income flowing if things should go a bit wrong.

Landlord building insurance can offer the standard protection against the perils of things like flood, earthquake, fire and storm etc, as well as providing financial cover if your property needs to be rebuilt following a major incident.

On the rebuild subject, it may be worth bearing in mind that the amount of cover you might need should reflect how much it would cost to rebuild your property should the worst happen.

This may be a completely different figure to what your property may have cost you to buy.

Having a professional survey carried out may be one way of getting an accurate figure to base your insurance cover around.

A bit more

Building insurance for landlords may also go a bit further than that and provide additional features of cover, either as standard or optional extras, which could be vital to helping you maintain your livelihood.

For example, tenants may be one of the main risks for a buy to let landlord and typical standard landlord insurance may not offer much cover for loss of rent due to tenants who abscond leaving rent arrears.

However, if your property is made uninhabitable as a result of damage due to an insured event though, with some providers, such as ourselves, your landlord building insurance may provide some cover for loss of rent until repairs have been carried out and your tenants can move back in.

Liability cover

Public liability insurance is potentially another important part of landlord building insurance.

If one of your tenants or even a member of the general public is injured by a piece of guttering falling from the roof of your property, then they may decide to sue you if there could be a case made that this was somehow due to some negligence on your part.

In addition to paying out damages if the case is found against you, you may also be liable for legal costs whatever the result of the claim.

Empty properties

Remember as well that if your property is empty for a period of 30 days or more, then your landlords building insurance may not provide the cover you expect.

You may have to supplement your cover with insurance specifically targeted at empty properties, often called vacant property insurance or unoccupied property insurance. This is because your property may be more at risk when it is empty than it is when you have tenants. For example:

• unoccupied properties may be more of a target for vandals or thieves;
• a small easily fixed leaking pipe may become a much more expensive to fix problem if left unattended and additional damage results.

Landlord building insurance provides levels of cover that standard owner-occupier home building and contents insurance doesn’t. So if you are tempted to make do with what might typically be the slightly cheaper owner occupier option you may be in for an unpleasant surprise if you have to claim and find that your insurance is invalid.