Table of Contents
Introduction
When buying a house, most prospective homeowners look for home insurance to protect them against damage and destruction to the property.
Mortgage lenders demand you have cover before borrowing. However, some people find many insurance products are not available to them, or that the costs vary and the don’t understand why.
In that case you need to find an insurance business that is open to more specialist policies (such as for larger homes or for those with previous financial difficulties).
At Emerald Life we provide cover for a wide range of situations including:
- Renovations
- Non-standard construction
- New builds with unrecognised postcodes
- Unoccupied homes
Shameless plug!
Award-winning Emerald Life is proud of the work is does for its customers – and thanks them for its 4.9/5 Feefo rating (Nov 2021) and the lovely reviews that you have submitted.
If you want to find out more, visit our site – www.emeraldlife.co.uk or you can get an immediate online quote from us here or call our helpful call center for more questions, to understand the features of our insurance better, or to get a taste of our award-winning business and service – and we are most proud of our Emerald service.
Who else is out there?
If you need home insurance, you need to find a company that provides unique cover. In this situation, homeowners can often find their choices limited by carriers who deny them cover.
Luckily, there are some insurers that can help and we will discuss one in this HomeProtect review, where we look at HomeProtect insurance for specialist home insurance.
HomeProtect insurance
Below we will look at HomeProtect, an insurance company that claims to take an inclusive approach to home insurance cover. Considering that’s exactly our area of expertise here at Emerald Life, we decided to directly compare our own solutions with the HomeProtect home insurance cover.
Now to the meat!
Should you get home insurance?
Perhaps the first thing many homeowners ask themselves is whether they need home insurance. After all, there are no legal requirements to have home insurance in the UK.
As mentioned, many mortgage lenders will only borrow on the condition that you have buildings insurance. But what if you are paying upfront for a property?
Well, while there is no legal requirement, failure to buy home insurance could be one of the most expensive cost-cutting measures you ever take.
Without insurance, you will be on the hook to pay for any damage or destruction to the structure and contents of your home, or to third parties. Property repairs can be hugely expensive, so a little each month for home insurance is a better option.
What Does HomeProtect Offer?
HomeProtect is an independent home insurance specialist that aims to deliver cover to customers in unique situations.
HomeProtect home insurance cover is underwritten by AXA. Policies are available for people who have specific personal requirements or properties that are not common. For example, customers who have a high claims history or those who live in property in flood-risk areas.
Among the unique properties HomeProtect will insure include barn conversions, listed buildings, houses with subsidence, timber frame constructions, and more.
Furthermore, they aim to tailor to a more inclusive range of customers, such as those with poor credit who cannot find cover through other insurers.
Certainly, if you have been refused home insurance by another company, it is worth getting a quote from HomeProtect. As a minimum, the company pledges to give a proper reason if it cannot offer you a policy.
Policies available at HomeProtect come in three tiers:
- Buildings Insurance: Cover for the structure of your property, including the cost of a total rebuild if the home is destroyed. Buildings insurance also covers boundary structures and outbuildings, and as well provides alternative accommodation. This is worth checking as various providers (such as Axa insurance or Avantia Insurance Limited to name but two) will have different levels of alternative accommodation cover, and that may make a difference between your alternative accommodation being a hotel or a caravan (joke!).
- Contents Insurance: Covers belongings you own. This is insurance for your “stuff”, covering against loss, damage, fire, and theft. Check the policy details carefully as there may be limits on mobile phones, loss of money, theft of possessions including money out of the house at another location.
- Buildings and Contents Insurance: A combination policy that bundles buildings insurance and contents insurance together.
At Emerald, we provide free legal cover when you take out a standard home insurance policy. This is something that breaks industry standards, with most home insurance providers selling this additional cover as anoptional extra. It is nice to see HomeProtect also offers legal cover as standard.
HomeProtect does not provide cover for lost keys as standard, meaning you will have to spend more to add this perk your policy. All Emerald buildings insurance policies come with replacement of locks and keys with no extra charge. Another notable addition to the Emerald home insurance policy is cover for your possessions and pedal cycles.
What else might you need or want to see?
There are other areas that do not strictly cover property damage. Here are some examples of optional extras:
- Does your policy cover basic legal expenses? You may want this (or an upgrade to full legal expenses) and when you look at legal expenses and home cover then this is an important issue when looking at an an insurance provider. Legal expenses cover might seem irrelevant and you may only need it rarely if at all but legal expenses cover can be important – have a look at what it covers though, as different policies can vary.
- Do you want full accidental damage cover to be included for your contents policy, building policy or both? In rare cases insurers may offer a basic accidental damage but this is rare.
- What about having home emergency cover included? If you want home emergency cover included, it is often an optional extra that will cost more but might be worth it. Many customers have home emergency cover as a good back up. Some policies offer legal expenses and home emergency as one package.
- Most insurance policies will include personal liability cover as the standard deal.
How Far Does Inclusivity Go?
HomeProtect prides itself on being inclusive and providing insurance products to more types of customers. That’s excellent news for homeowners with special insurance circumstances. However, HomeProtect only means inclusivity in the insurance sense.
At Emerald, we offer inclusive insurance in the strictest sense of the term. All our products are available to all customers without compromise.
We want those who are under-represented in society to have access to insurance products. Emerald was created to ensure those in non-traditional families, minority groups, and are LGBQT+ can get insurance without discrimination.
Yes, we also provide excellent home insurance cover that is available to any other customer too. Furthermore, like HomeProtect, we also specialise in delivering home insurance to customers with unique insurance circumstances.
Let’s be clear, it is not that HomeProtect will not work with you if you are part of an under-represented group. The company has stellar customer ratings that reflect its reputation with consumers, who mostly like what’s on offer. It’s just that the company is not focused on this aspect of inclusivity, whereas Emerald is, and provides insurance with an open mind.
Knowing What You Are Getting
One problematic area of the HomeProtect experience is the company’s site. Finding exact details about what their policy offers on the site is not easy. Or more accurately, you need to dig around a bit online to find the basics of the home insurance policy. Sure, that shouldn’t be a dealbreaker, but it is annoying for a customer when they are comparing policies.
We don’t expect a customer to have to open policy PDFs to know the basics of what we offer. Yes, you can access the policy documentation if you choose, but Emerald makes the basics of its home insurance policy easily accessible on our website.
Also, as with any insurer, if there’s a claim, make sure that you can get your money quickly and without fuss to it’s important to look at your insurer’s claim history and any claim reviews on websites. In theory, you make be covered but being covered doesn’t matter if your insurer takes too long to pay.
Conclusion
HomeProtect is a good choice for home insurance if you have specific policy needs or are in a unique situation.
For example, a claims history or you live in an uncommon type of property. In these circumstances, you can get buildings insurance and contents insurance from HomeProtect even if other insurers have turned you down.
However, Emerald takes this inclusive approach further by giving every under-represented customer a place to buy the type of unique coverage available at HomeProtect. So it’s worth taking time to compare.
While we naturally recommend our own product, we also advise anyone reading this article to head to both HomeProtect and Emerald to properly compare the policies, and decide which one is best based on their own individual needs before getting a quote online.
Regulatory
Emerald Life has its registered office in England and Wales with a company number and is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority FCA, firm reference number 666615 on the financial services register. It is registered as a limited company registered in England in Companies House with registered number available there and is directly regulated and authorised given its registered address and registered office in England. Companies authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority can be found at the Financial Conduct Authority’s website – fca.org.uk – which deals with financial services.
