Some more thoughts on insurance - is this fair?

There's been a fair amount of discussion about insurance companies on here recently and I thought it might be interesting to share some details of a telephone conversation my OH had with an insurance company yesterday. He was checking out insurances for my car and doing online quotes but put in the wrong house number. We are on a half acre and have the numbers 6 and 8, but we only use 6 because that's what's on our letterbox. He put in 8 by mistake. When he noticed and fixed it, the quote went up by $22. Now given that 6 and 8 are both us and nothing else had changed, that was a bit of a mystery, so he did a Pauline and rang to say 'Please explain.'

It would appear that there has 'probably' been a previous claim against 6 but not against 8, which isn't surprising because to all intents and purposes 8 doesn't exist. I think this is a bit unfair because if there has been an earlier claim it would have been made by the previous owners. We haven't made any claims since we have been here (4 years) but their claim from however long ago still affects our premium. It's only $22 on this occasion but under other circumstances it could be higher I would think.

A suggestion was to use 8 to get the lower premium but make the mailing address 6 so paperwork would come here without a problem. Ok, that's great - maybe. I still wonder what would happen in the event of a claim.

Anyway my thoughts are that most people wouldn't have the option of using another number to get a lower quote and would be stuck with the history of previous owners making their premiums higher. And keeping in mind that this was car insurance and not house insurance anyway one wonders what the house address has to do with anything, unless of course the claim was for a car stolen from the address, which I suppose is always a possibility even though there is a perfectly good lock up garage.

What do you think, is it fair that the history of previous owners of your house can be held against you?
 
Last edited:
Actually that's what we were doing, shopping around the insurers. My point is that if it wasn't for the mistake with the number we would have no idea about any of this. I suspect it happens with all insurers, any claim against the property affects the premium no matter who makes it. We are all aware that our postcode affects our premiums but my guess would be that not many people realise that previous claims against the actual property come into play as well.

If I am right it transfers to rental properties too. I can see a scenario where the tenants make a claim on their contents insurance and that would then affect the landlord's house insurance. Could explain why sometimes a premium rises so steeply.
 
Back
Top