Sinead Campbell from Residentsline provides us with a short quiz to test your team’s insurance knowledge.

At Residentsline, we are committed to protecting your business and we believe providing useful insurance training can come in extremely handy- especially in these most unusual times.

Many of us are currently working remotely- are you sure that your staff have adequate skills to organise Insurance for your clients?

When was the last time you checked and documented their understanding of insurance?

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Thinking about the following scenarios, would you and your team know how to react?

• You notice one of the dwellings within your property is currently being advertised on Air BNB – what should you do?
• Mid-term and following a valuation, it has come to light that your property is Grade II* Listed – what should you do?
• One of the directors of the Management Company is a senior manager of a business that has recently gone into liquidation – what should you do?
• Your property needs to have some major works completed which will involve the use of Scaffolding – what should you do?
• You take over a site where a fire risk assessment has not been completed for some time and the insurance was recently renewed – what should you do?

If your team do not know how to react to the above questions, we can help – ask your team to complete our quiz. If they get stuck ask us for help we can help fill in the gaps.

Arranging insurance on behalf of others can be a daunting task and the level of expertise required can often be underestimated. The questions raised by insurance companies don’t always have obvious answers so what happens if we just make assumptions?

A statement of fact or proposal form combined with your contract certain quote can often be lengthy and time consuming to read word for word – and imagine comparing several of them at the same time!

Documentation issued by insurers often looks similar and generally includes some fundamental information that applies across the industry – when did you last read this small print? Here are some important statements that can very often be nestled in within the paperwork and are generally overlooked or missed – thinking about the properties you manage, could these have disastrous consequences if not considered fully?

• The property is not listed or of significant importance
• The property is well maintained and in a good state of repair
• The property is not undergoing renovations / repairs or conversion
• The property is not in an area with a known history of subsidence
• The property is not in an area with a known history of flooding
• You have completed a fire risk assessment
• The property does not include any second homes or holiday homes

These are statements that generally default to the “best case” scenario – you might not have been asked the question but your insurers will have arranged cover on the basis of these assumptions.

Using our knowledge of the Property Management sector we have prepared some every day scenarios to help you think about getting the insurance right from the outset. The insurance Act 2015 states: “before the contract is entered into the insured must make to the insurer a fair presentation of the risk” including:

(a) Disclosure of every material circumstance which the insured knows or ought to know, or

(b) Failing that, disclosure which gives the insurer sufficient information to put a prudent insurer on notice that it needs to make further enquiries for the purpose of revealing those material circumstances.

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To contact the Residentsline team, head to their website or call 0800 281 235.