Another survey of house insurance prices in Ireland this month – and the overall result once again shows that consumers need to shop around to save money. It is too easy to just automatically renew the house insurance every year with the same company – it’s less hassle. But by spending maybe an hour or two getting a few quotes you could save at least €300 Euro on 12 months home insurance.
The Financial Regulator comparison was carried out on 9 different insurance providers in Ireland. They obtained quotes for 7 different properties or scenarios .
The worst example of high prices was by AIG (PreviouslyChartis Direct ) who quoted €1147 to insure a property with no smoke alarms – yet FBD quoted €283 for the same house.
AIG seemed to be the one company to avoid :- out of all 7 samples in the comparison – they declined to quote on 2 of them and they gave the most expensive quote in all the other examples.
Even ignoring AIG – there were still price differences of between €200 and €300 .
For buildings and Contents cover combined – Lloyds (getcover.com) gave the lowest quote in 4 out of 6 cases . Zurich beat them by just €3 in one case and FBD beat them by €7 in another case.
For contents only insurance for a tenant (Value €35k) – Liberty Insurance were the lowest price – they quoted €159 while Zurich quoted €417 – an increase of 262%
The comparison did not include brokers – but other comparisons in the past have found that sometimes brokers such as AA Insurance can be cheaper.
As usual – the advice is Shop Around.