When you prepare a home insurance policy, you must tailor it to clients' unique property. A home in the country will have different insurance risks than a home in the city. To some of your clients, this might not seem readily evident. As their agent, you should know how to explain these risks to them so that they know how to protect themselves. Only after that should you help them choose the right policy. What are some of the issues you should discuss with your rural clients? Can you help them get better coverage?
Rural Property Risks
Their very locations make rural homes isolated from others. They also likely contain more property than homes with standardized lots. Thus, rural owners might have a bit less control over their overall property. They might even have more property value than the standard urban or suburban home. Factors like these often might create a different set of property risks. In the wrong situations, those might prove extremely costly.
Your job is to make sure that clients understand these risks. The more your clients know about their home's safety, the better precautions they can take. Some of the things to watch out for might include:
- Theft Risks: Rural homes likely don't have close connections to their neighbors. That isolation might make the home an easy target for thieves. They might be able to break in and make a clean getaway without anyone ever noticing them.
- Weather Damage Risks: Homes that sit in wooded areas with a high amount of foliage might face more weather damage risks than in designed communities. Falling limbs and branches, lightning strikes and windblown debris might impact the home. If they do, then you might face a high repair bill.
- Slow Emergency Response: Rural homes don't have the same access to emergency services that cities do. So, if a rural homeowner calls the fire department, it might take responders longer to get to the home. In that time, the fire might easily become out of control and destroy the home.
By conveying risks like these to clients, you can better help them insure themselves. They might want higher levels of property and possessions insurance. Those limits can better insure them in case of severe losses. You might even help them decide on security precautions that might not only protect them, but also lower their insurance rates. Since you likely want to help them save, having this conversation might help you do so easily.
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