How to guarantee your renters have insurance

Hey, guys. Mike Taylor, broker owner, Red door Property Management. Today I wanted to give a little secret out. I wanted to share with you how we guarantee all 100% of our residents have renters' insurance. And so, because what happened was in the past, we would mandate that they have renters' insurance. Of course, if you're thinking anything else that should I have my renters have renters' insurance? Absolutely you should. It's only going to protect you. It protects their stuff as well, but it protects you in terms of liability. So, what we used to do is we used to require renters' insurance and we would get a copy of the certificate before moving. But the problem was that there was nothing to stop them from paying their monthly premium so they could show us the fact that they had coverage at move in and they could stop paying it the next month. So, there's just not enough time in the day to police that. 

So, one of the things that we do here at Red Door to protect our owners is that we guarantee the renters have renters' insurance. How do we do that? Well, we buy a master policy for all of our rental units and then we put each individual tenant on that master policy. So, we pay it on their behalf. We charge them, of course, for that, but we pay it on their behalf. So, we know that all of our tenants have renters' insurance. And so, it's really good coverage. 

Let me read some of the coverages here. So it's up to $100,000 per occurrence for smoke, fire, water, explosion, backup or overflow of sewer, drain, sump pump, falling objects collapse, whatever that means. There's $5,000 for loss of rental income, there's$1,000 for pet damage, there's $1,000 for mold remediation, and there's a $500 for bedbug remediation. So, it's really good coverage and it's not costing you the owner anything. So, we are absolutely guaranteeing that all of our tenants have this in place because we buy it for them. And that's just one of the benefits of working with Red Door, is that we provide this. Now that's part of a larger thing that we call our residence benefits package.

And there's another aspect to it too, which is in that benefits package, we also ship to the tenant. Every quarter, we ship them a new furnace filter. And it's time stamped so we know when it was delivered to them. When we go to the move out or an inspection, we can take a look in there and see if it's been seen when the last filter was changed. And if it hasn't been changed, then we can actually build them for a cleaning of the furnace. Because what we were finding before we implemented this was that nobody would ever change those furnace filters that we would get in there. They would be filthy or they would be running without a filter. And that's just not good for your furnace, your AC, that's one of the most expensive components of your home. And so, this mitigates that expense and reduces operating costs for the tenant and reduces repair costs for the owner. So, it's really truly a win-win situation here. 

So, I did just want to share real briefly. Real life story from our tenant insurance package is that we are actually experiencing the claim right now. The tenant actually moved out early, shut off the utilities. They didn't tell us any of this. They moved out early, didn't tell us shut off the utilities. This was last month or a couple of months ago when it was really cold and the pipes froze, water leaked everywhere, I mean draining through the ceiling, all of that kind of stuff. So really big damage, big claim. And this insurance policy is picking up 100% of the bill. So, if they didn't have renters' insurance in place, that would be on the homeowner or on the homeowner's insurance. But because of this, the homeowner is not going to have to come up with anything out of pocket. Kind of get a free remodel on the place.So all of these policies are in place. They do work and there is a way to guarantee that your renters have renters' insurance. 

So, the answer is to buy it for them and put it in place for them. That's what we do here at Red Door. That's our secret of how we are protecting our owners for the properties that we manage. 

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