Compare Building Insurance

Building insurance is for the ‘home’ in home and contents insurance. It could help cover the costs of repairing or rebuilding parts or all of your house, whether it’s your place of residence or an investment property.

While it doesn’t cover contents, like your possessions, it’s more than just the four walls and a roof. Permanent physical structures, like showers and light fittings, also fall under the Building Insurance umbrella. Plus, depending on your policy, you may even be covered for temporary accommodation if you need to live elsewhere while your home is being fixed.

Your building insurance can apply to a range of scenarios, like natural disasters through to man-made damage. Some circumstances may be a given with your building insurance or you may need to add them as extras to expand your coverage. Your building insurance Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) should outline exactly when you’ll be covered and in what ways.

In an insured event, your building insurance could cover the repairing, replacing or rebuilding of your home, inside and out. This includes your home itself, along with fixtures like your garage, toilet and even your driveway and fence. Again, if you want to get the full story, checking out the PDS may be a good idea.

Your building insurance is unlikely to cover every event under the sun. Some are just extremely unlikely to happen (like aliens teleporting your pool onto their spaceship), while others are all too common (like the general wear and tear any place goes through if someone lives there).  

Other times when you might not be covered or need to purchase additional coverage include: 

• Flood 
• Asbestos 
• Defects, structural faults or design faults 
• Intentional acts by you or with your consent 
• Repossession 
• Not keeping your property in good condition 
• Terrorism 
• Vermin 
• If your home is unoccupied for a certain length of time 

Along with certain circumstances, there are also some parts and fixtures of your home that may not be covered by your policy, like:

• Above-ground pools 
• Carpet 
• Gardens 
• Curtains 
• Caravans

However, a contents insurance policy may cover these items.

Like humans, older homes come with their fair share of creaks and groans. This can also mean that a claim on building insurance isn’t too far off either. Leaky pipes or simply having weathered one too many summer storms can cause everything to come tumbling down. Just to be clear, older homes are classified as any properties that are 50 years or older, but you may find some homes have better bones than others. 

Age isn’t the only factor that can put your home at risk though. It’s also location, location, location. Some parts of Australia are more prone to floods, while others get more than their fair share of fires. You can even drill down to a suburb level for vandalism and break-ins too. 

You can get the heads up on what to expect from your state when it comes to building insurance risk factors with the links below:

• New South Wales 
• Northern Territory 
• Queensland 
• South Australia 
• Tasmania 
• Victoria 
• Western Australia 

In the grand scheme of things, sum-insured and total replacement both cover you to rebuild or repair your home. The difference lies in the risk of being underinsured.

Sum-insured cover uses an estimate of what it would cost to fully rebuild your home if it suddenly became a pile of rubble. Total replacement cover goes a step further by covering the cost of rebuilding your home to exactly how it was (or close to). With sum-insured cover, you may find that your home is under-insured. However, total replacement cover can be harder to get a hold of and more expensive than its sum-insured sibling.

There are a couple of things you could try to get more value out of your sum-insured cover though to close that gap between the two types of cover.

• Check if your insurer offers a safeguard or safety net feature that gives you an additional amount of cover if you’re dealing with a total loss 
• Get pedantic with your calculations and look at elemental estimating, which can be more accurate than going off standard cost per square metre

There’s no one-size-fits-all home and that means there’s no one-size-fits-all coverage amount for building insurance. But you can estimate what yours could be by using an online calculator and taking into account more than simply the size of your house and what it’s made from. Think about the quality of the fixtures, for instance. Are they from IKEA and Bunnings or somewhere a little more upmarket? If you want a more accurate answer, it may even be worth working with someone who’s in the business, like an architect, to really nail down that answer and set aside those under-insured anxieties.

You may also want to think about other expenses that come with rebuilding a home. Where will you and your family stay in the meantime? If you think you might wear out your welcome at friends’ homes or you’d rather not head back to your childhood bedroom, you may want cover that includes temporary accommodation.

Unless you’re a Kardashian, you’re not going to get something for nothing and that includes building insurance. But there are a few things you might like to try to tinker with your premium.

• Bump up your excess: Paying a little more when you need to claim could shrink your premium 
• Laser in on that estimate: While it’s fair to want to avoid under-insuring your home, over-insuring could mean you’re paying more in premiums. You might, instead, want to have a go at a more accurate estimate 
• Beef up your home security: A secure home is less likely to be broken into, or so the thinking goes for insurers. Installing an alarm or two, for instance, could lower your premium 
• Tailor your cover: Bells and whistles are nice and all, but going for every extra could be supersizing your premium 
• Compare policies: You wouldn’t buy the first shirt you see on the rack so why treat Building Insurance any differently? Comparing building insurance policies could help you find one that offers better value (and a lower premium)

If your home is part of a strata, you may already have a level of building insurance, thanks to your body corporate. However, it might be worthwhile double checking what coverage this offers and if you want to extend it with your own policy.

Additionally, if it’s an investment property you’re thinking about, you may want to consider landlord insurance. This could give you coverage for damage to your property caused by tenants.