Home Insurance - in The United Kingdom

In The United Kingdom

As in the US, mortgage lenders within the UK require the rebuild value (the actual cost of rebuilding a property to its current state should it be damaged or destroyed) of a property to be covered as a condition of the loan. However, the rebuild cost is often lower than the market value of the property, as the market value often reflects the property as a going-concern, as opposed to just the value of the bricks and mortar.

A number of factors, such as an increase in fraud and increasingly unpredictable weather, have seen home insurance premiums continue to rise in the UK. For this reason, there has been a shift in how home insurance is bought in the UK—as customers become a lot more price sensitive, there has been a large increase in the amount of policies sold through price comparison sites. In addition to standard home insurance, some 8 million households in the UK are categorized as being a "non standard" risk. These households would require a Specialist or Non Standard insurer that would cover home insurance needs for people that have criminal convictions and/or subsidence in the property or have previously been underpinned.