When shopping for home insurance for your Woodstock, GA home, you might think every homeowners’ policy works the same way and this is far from true. Your policy would pay for you to repair or purchase a new home if the incumbent home incurred damage covered under the policy. The value of the home and the valuation method are enumerated in the policy details through and decide how much money you would receive if a named peril damaged the house.
This blog explains the difference between valuation methods so you can make a savvy insurance purchase from Peter Laczko Insurance Inc. Your home policy might use one of the following five values for your home:
- guaranteed replacement value,
- replacement value,
- cash value,
- fair market value,
- extended replacement value.
Almost no insurers offer guaranteed replacement value any longer. That pays you what it would cost to replace your home as it was when you purchased it, but at today’s market rates. Instead, many insurance companies offer extended replacement value which functions in a similar manner but requires you to purchase an add-on home warranty as part of your insurance coverage.
Replacement value provides you the money to purchase a home at the value you purchased your home, while case value gives you what it was worth just before the damage from the named peril occurred. Fair market value pays what it sounds like it does – what you would get if you had sold the home before the peril damaged it. You get its value on the real estate market.
Each of these valuation methods can result in vastly different payouts. You may have purchased a historical home with intrinsic value. Since your purchase, the local building codes may have undergone updates. Those updates require you to spend much more money to build to code than re-building just as the home was constructed originally. Only guaranteed replacement value and extended replacement value would pay for the updated home completely. The other methods would leave you with out-of-pocket expenses.
Replacement value would come close but still would not cover everything. Cash value and fair market value could leave you in the hole by thousands of dollars since they look at replacing the home in present value. You might have cared perfectly for your home, but the fair market value could lower your payout since the fair market value of a home also includes the value of the neighborhood. If your neighborhood declined, it impacts the value of your home.
Contact Peter Laczko Insurance Inc. for more information on insuring your home in Woodstock, GA. We can help you properly insure your investment.
