If You Don't Live Near Parks Or Vacant Land, You Could Pay Less For Home Insurance

Neighbours are great sometimes - they can collect your mail while you're on holidays

, check that you've shut the front door when you're halfway across town, and pop your dog back inside the gate when he manages to get out. Did you know that your neighbours could actually be helping you save on your insurance premiums, just by being there? Parks and vacant land sound like an appealing characteristic for your home, but they do represent increased risks. People living near parks or vacant blocks are more at risk of both crimes and bushfire. So if you have neighbours on all sides of you, and no adjacent empty land, you could be paying less for your home insurance and contents insurance!

Increased risk of bushfire

Even if the vacant land you live next to is not extensive (for example, just a couple of blocks across), in the event of a fire there is nobody defending it. It is more likely to be covered with dry grass or shrubs, and therefore represents an increased fire risk. The same is true of parks - in times of extreme fire danger, there is more fast-burning fuel available in parks than in homes, which have water piped directly to them, and people with a vested interest in protecting them!

Increased risk of crime

Where there are parks (and occasionally where there is vacant land), there is also increased risk of crime. Criminology theory identifies three factors that contribute to rising crime rates:

A population of motivated offenders (people who stand to benefit by committing a crime with lower risk of paying consequences)

Suitable targets (that would be your home!)

A lack of capable guardians. If you have neighbours, you have greater numbers of capable guardians - your safety is tied in with your neighbours'. Having parkland or vacant blocks reduces the number of 'capable guardians', and therefore increases the crime rate.

How this affects your home insurance

If there is increased risk of a crime or bushfire occurring ... then there is an increased risk that you will have to claim on your policy! This user-pays system fits in well with the general setup of our society. In standard insurance, though, the risk profile is usually postcode-wide. So you are paying in your premiums for the increased risk of all the people in your suburb who have vacant blocks or parkland next to their home.

It used to be that these sorts of micro-statistics were simply too hard to take into account in home insurance calculations. Advances in information availability and software have given insurance companies the power to micro-manage risk where before it wasn't possible - and the innovative companies have started right away!

Look for...

Companies that don't make assumptions on your home insurance quote - those that actually ask you what your environment is like. It takes a couple of minutes more to fill out the form - but you could be getting big discounts on your policy in return.

by: Hugo Shreuder

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