A Guide to Vacant Property Insurance

It is a little-known fact that most standard building insurance policies only continue to cover your building when it is empty for a certain amount of time – for example, 30 – 60 days. This is the case for commercial properties as well as residential properties. This is thought to cover the timespan of most reasons why you might leave a building unoccupied and still be using it. Reasons that your building could unexpectedly become empty include problems with finding tenants, new purchases, and necessary renovations that render it unusable for its existing purpose.

If your property is empty for more than this amount of time, then your insurance provider may want to change the type of insurance that they offer you to a type called vacant property insurance – and if you don’t warn them that your property is going to be empty for this prolonged period then your insurance is likely to be invalid.

The reason behind this change is because an empty property is by nature at higher risk of accidents and crimes. For example, there is no-one to deter an opportunistic thief or squatter, and if a pipe freezes and bursts, or damp starts to spread, or a subsistence issues appears in the roof, then there is no-one who can fix the problem. This makes your empty property a higher risk to insure.

Rather than spending time negotiating with your insurer for the higher cost of unoccupied property insurance, or running the dangerous risk of going without it, you could simply solve the problem by ensuring that your property is no longer empty.

As London’s leading live-in-guardian company, we can place trustworthy and reliable people into your buildings. The benefits of this strategy are numerous, from lowering your security and monitoring costs to getting rid of the need for that pesky empty property insurance.

Our live-in guardians are carefully vetted. They are in full-time employment, and are typically aged between 25 and 45. We ensure that you have responsible and security-conscious people occupying your property.

The guardians have non-exclusive licenses to occupy your particular property, and upon ending the agreement with us that license terminates. This ensures that you avoid any complications from tenancy rights which might interfere with your own tenancy plans, for example.

While the guardians are taking care of your property, we make inspections and send you reports to ensure that the building is being maintained to our high standards.

To find out more about our services, please contact us using our contact page, or read our detailed FAQ pages.