Why Home Inspector Insurance Is Critical for Your Financial Protection
If you’re a home inspector or building inspector, this scenario isn’t hard to imagine: You’re on a ladder looking at some brickwork when you lose your footing, fall, injure your elbow, and need medical attention. Or maybe you fail to inspect a critical aspect of a home’s electrical system, which later causes a fire that damages the structure.
Without the right building or home inspector insurance policies, these common occurrences could be very costly to your business. However, if you have coverage for these types of incidents, you can recover from them without any overwhelming expenses.
If you don’t have insurance or aren’t sure if you have the right policies, the good news is it’s easy to remedy that situation. Getting business insurance from biBerk takes just minutes, and policies provide cost-effective protection for home inspectors.
Insurance for Home Inspectors: Shielding Your Business From the Unexpected
Every owner hopes unexpected events don’t adversely affect their business. However, incidents can and do occur. Every day, home inspectors are sued, suffer losses from property damage, or find themselves addressing the repercussions of recent events.
Safe business practices can reduce your risk of adverse events. You should also ensure there is a written statement of work assigned by the buyer (and signed before work begins) that includes a clause limiting the damages to the contract or the minimum allowable by state. This type of contract can earn insurance discounts for you.
Even with those important steps, you must be insured against risks. Without policies to cover potential liability and losses, you will have to pay for judgments and other expenses from your company’s revenues or savings. If you end up with a financial burden your business can’t bear, you may have to close your doors permanently.
So, even if you’ve never been injured or suffered property damage, the optimal strategy is to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. When you pause to consider your risk exposures and then take action to address them, you’ll likely find that you can tackle projects more confidently and sleep better at night.
Building Inspector and Home Inspector Insurance Policies
Rather than providing one comprehensive business insurance policy to cover all risks, insurers typically sell multiple coverage types specific to different exposures.
biBerk offers seven policies. We’ve developed each to address different risks. The policies necessary to protect a given home or building inspection business vary based on several factors, including the size of the business, whether there are employees, its claims history, and others.
Not sure what policies you need? No problem. Our licensed insurance experts can quickly learn about your company and the risks you face and recommend appropriate coverage—from policies and associated limits to any policy add-ons needed.
Consider these seven policies as you look to secure financial protection for your home inspection business:
- Professional liability insurance. You may see this policy referred to by various other names, including errors and omissions insurance for home inspectors and home inspector E&O insurance. This coverage can protect you if you make a mistake in the services provided to your clients and they allege it caused them a financial loss.
- General liability insurance. Also called commercial liability insurance, this type of home inspector liability insurance covers damages and legal costs associated with incidents like injuries to non-employees and property damage. It also covers libel, slander, and copyright infringement, such as in your advertisements. Plus, you can add endorsements to customize your general liability insurance policy, including cyber, employment-related practices liability, and others.
- Business owners policy (BOP). Also called property & liability insurance, this home inspection insurance policy combines general liability insurance with coverage for the space you operate out of and any property you need to run your organization. It also covers business interruption, such as costs to continue or resume your work following a covered loss. You can tailor your BOP with add-ons, including things like cyber and employment-related practices liability.
- Cyber insurance. Purchased as an add-on to a general liability policy, professional liability policy, or BOP, this type of coverage can pay expenses from system hacks or data security breaches where someone steals sensitive information and uses it (or is likely to use it) to commit fraud.
- Workers' compensation insurance. If your home inspection business has employees, your state probably requires you to have workers’ comp coverage. It pays for medical expenses and lost wages from on-the-job injuries or illnesses. It can also pay a “death benefit” to the family of someone who dies at work.
- Commercial auto insurance. Some home inspection businesses own or lease vehicles. If yours does, this policy protects the company if someone driving one of your vehicles is at fault in an auto accident that causes third-party property damage or injuries.
- Umbrella insurance. Every liability insurance policy has a maximum value that it will cover in the event of an incident. Umbrella insurance provides additional protection, paying costs exceeding the limit of another biBerk liability policy up to its own limit.
Getting the appropriate policies with adequate limits is vital to protecting your home inspection business.
What Does Home Inspector Insurance Cost?
How big is your company? Where do you operate? What’s your claims history? The answers to these and related questions will affect your home inspector insurance cost.
However, you’ll probably be glad to learn that you can typically get hundreds of thousands of dollars in coverage (or more) for as little as hundreds annually.
To find out specifically what you’ll pay, you can obtain instant, self-service quotes online at your convenience. And you can purchase policies, report claims, and manage your policies on our website. But we also have licensed insurance experts who are happy to assist you.
Home Inspector Liability Insurance: Remember to Review Your Policies Regularly
As your business evolves and your industry changes, it’s crucial to review your coverage periodically. Taking a few minutes to refresh your memory on policy specifics regularly will help you determine if any modifications are needed.
For example, if you were a solo operator but have now hired one or more additional home inspectors or other employees, your state may require that you have workers’ compensation insurance. Or if you recently purchased a truck for business purposes, you likely need commercial auto insurance. And other scenarios might necessitate increasing your policy limits.
It’s simple to ensure you have the right business insurance policies. You can review them on your own or contact a biBerk insurance expert for assistance. They can talk with you about the current state of your operations and determine if you should make any coverage changes.
We encourage you to review your policies annually (or more frequently, if your business changes) and make modifications to protect your business from liability and losses.