Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 10:52 PM
Fire Insurance on Canyons
The Dawg asked about getting fire insurance for canyon-front properties, and it’s not easy these days. The house I sold on Nightshade (in picture) was a standard 1997 tract house that backed to a small, contained canyon – you can see the houses across the way. Yet just because it was on a canyon, the insurance carriers that the buyer called wouldn’t touch it. Instead, he ended up going through my favorite insurance broker, and she was able to get Travelers to insure this house for only $982 per year.
But if you are in an extremely high risk area, you need a miracle, or you can insure with AIG. I say extremely, because the house on Mesa Norte was NOT in a ‘very high fire hazard zone’, nor in a ‘wildland area that may contain substantial forest fire risk’. But with a mile or so of dedicated open space behind it, the majority of the insurance companies wouldn’t insure after consulting their own maps and satellite photos.
AIG is the company in San Diego that has their own fire trucks, and were featured in many news stories last October for saving some houses in Rancho Santa Fe. They aren’t cheap though, they are about double the cost of other carriers, plus they insist on handling all of the client’s other insurance needs too.
Of course, there’s always the California Fair Plan:
Posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 10:52 PM in Thinking of Buying? | 2 Comments » | 
Print
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Mercury would not touch any house that’s 2400 feet within a canyon/dry bushes. both clients that request renter’s insurance or home fire insurance are referred to "high risk" insurance carriers.
ocrenter | April 1st, 2008 at 12:55 amBesides paying extra for the canyon view, we now have to pay a little more to get the house insured. I guess buyers should use this as leverage for negotiating a lower price. Jim, thanks for the heads up on this.
dejams | April 1st, 2008 at 5:27 am