Is Probate House Insurance Compulsory?

Whilst Probate House Insurance isn’t compulsory in the same way as insuring your car, specialist cover should be viewed as a priority by the Personal Representatives due to the significance of their personal liability for declined claims resulting from gaps in cover or underinsurance.

The common risks you might face are:

1. One of the Personal Representatives extends the existing insurance arranged by the deceased, not realising:
   1. The cover is stripped back to basic cover, excluding common types of claims.
   2. The deceased may have accidentally underinsured the property, a liability the Personal Representatives inherit by extending the cover.
2. When buying a new policy, standard Unoccupied Policies often:
   1. Provides basic cover, creating a liability for underinsurance.
   2. End when you get Probate, which isn’t the end of the process; it’s just the acceptance of the application. Your liability continues until the property is sold or inherited. So if you didn’t realise the cover with some insurers can automatically end when you have probate, you could end up being uninsured altogether.

If you bought a standard policy that excludes claims like a burst pipe, theft, vandalism, subsidence, flood and more, if a claim comes in, it wouldn’t be the estate that funds repair or replacement of property it would be the personal representatives responsible for insuring it.  In fact, the beneficiaries are legally entitled to sue all the personal representatives to recover the lost value of their inheritance.

So insuring with a Probate specialist like Insuristic can make a lot of sense and be a safer option.

We have designed a policy specifically for empty Probate in probate and to protect the liability of the people responsible for insuring it. 

Our policy is not a rebadged copy of a standard unoccupied home insurance policy. 

You will find the cover, the information we provide, and the questions we ask are all specific to probate.

Our cover options are broad to help you protect your liability and can be bought short-term, or annually, from the point someone passes away until the property is sold, occupied again or inherited.

Plus, we know it's hard to know when the Probate process ends. So to help you avoid paying too much for property insurance, we have a really fair approach to cancellations that you may not find anywhere else.

If you need to cancel earlier than planned, provided you haven’t claimed, there are no cancellation fees, and you get back the value of any unused time on cover.

To find out more about our cover or get a quote, visit our Probate House Insurance page.