Getting STR Insurance for your Florida Vacation Rental.

If you have tried getting an insurance quote for your home in Florida, get ready to allocate more time for this than you originally dared to. Add the need for a wind insurance, 6 months of coverage for loss of rental income, and your really gearing up for some quotes that you most likely were unprepared for. 

One of the main reasons for this is because of the many fraudulent insurance claims that have been submitted to insurance carriers in the past year.

Check out this article to see why this is happening in Florida.

https://www.bankrate.com/insur...

Currently, we are sort of in the midst of settling on an insurance carrier. We've spent lots of time trying to get the right carrier (with not much success). 

Here are the options we are considering. 

1. Proper Insurance: By far the best coverage tailored for a vacation rental. They were a relatively affordable option but they did not have the coverage required by our lender. If you are buying in cash, this is probably the best solution for you. 

2. Kin: Kin, similarly to Proper, is geared towards the vacation rental industry. They had the requirements to make our lender happy, but they were 40% more expensive than Proper was, with similar coverage. 

3. Safely: Safely is a unique type of coverage. They will integrate with the OTA of your choice and offer coverage for the days you have your place rented. They did say that they would be able to provide an EPI to our lender's liking but we did not even take it that far for the reason being, we were uncomfortable with the idea of not having coverage when the property was vacant.

4. Standard Landlord Insurance. We got a quote from Citizens for standard landlord insurance. This would satisfy our lenders and is actually 55% percent cheaper than our preferred carrier, Proper. However, the coverage is really inadequate with the increased liability that comes with a vacation rental. We may consider going ahead with them just to get to closing and then switch over to Proper which is better suited for us.

If you at first get quotes that seem really high, please don't get discouraged. Most of the quotes we got were way higher than the most expensive coverage by KIN. Keep on shopping and make sure to reach out to one of the above-mentioned insurance carriers for your best quote. 

Happy shopping!