If you’re a landlord thinking about cheap landlord insurance, then that immediately suggests two important things:

• you have recognised the importance of protecting your interests through landlord insurance;
• you are already thinking of how you can get suitable cover at an affordable price.

Landlord insurance – to help protect your finances

If you’re an experienced landlord, then you probably don’t need anyone to tell you that it can be a risky business.

By contrast, if you’re considering buy to let insurance and becoming a landlord for the first time, then you may perhaps be at risk of under-estimating the risks you face.

Let’s consider briefly, just a summary of some of the problems you may potentially face:

• accidents happening to tenants or their guests (or even passers-by) that are directly attributable to your property;
• theft of your contents;
• vandalism to your property and/or its contents;
• natural disasters such as fire etc.

This is not a complete list and it may be advisable to ensure that any cheap landlord insurance is capable of dealing with these sorts of things.

The nature of cheap insurance

Times are tough and it’s understandable if you’re looking for the more suitable deals, financially speaking.

Yet a little caution may be advisable when thinking about anything describing itself as cheap landlord insurance.

The problem is that it can be difficult or perhaps even impossible, to define exactly what cheap means.

In one sense, if you find a policy that is lower cost than any other, you may be able to say that you’ve found cheap landlord insurance.

Unfortunately though, that’s only one side of the equation and the other one, such as what cover you’re actually getting for your money, may be equally as important to consider.

An hypothetical example

To illustrate this, consider two landlord insurance policies.

Policy A is cheaper than policy B.

Yet policy A offers contents replacement on a new-for-old basis whereas policy B only provides replacement on a market valuation basis.

If you’re unlucky enough to suffer a fire and need to replace many of your contents, policy A may offer you a far better reimbursement than policy B.

In such circumstances, if you have policy B you may suddenly find that it no longer appears to be even remotely something you consider to be bargain landlord insurance – particularly as you start having to write out some large cheques to replace your contents.

A rational appraisal

There are of course many other such examples but they all indicate the same thing – that any landlord insurance needs to be reviewed against your total requirements before it’s possible to be sure that you have a suitable policy.

What this means is that low cost landlord insurance isn’t something that can be seen in terms of price alone. It may be better to consider what your minimum requirements are, then to try and check those against policies that can deliver against them.

Once you have that information to hand, only then is it perhaps advisable to move onto looking at the policy prices to make some form of comparison between them.

So, before diving in headfirst into that policy advertised as cheap landlord insurance, make sure you know what you’re looking for and that the policy will give it to you!