Owner's Insurance for Condos

Most condo building insurance covers all liability to the studs of your walls. Everything else is your responsibility, basically your apartment finishes, cabinets, floors, furniture, etc. Cost is dependent on your level of insurance, but it is pretty cheap. Try travelers or call your car insurance company for a recommendation.

ephraim, search discussions for "chubb", and a bunch will turn up.

We bought a condo unit on Roosevelt Island, the Manager is the Related Companies. To close, we had to satisfy the the condo minimum requirements to insurance, i.e. of "$300,000 personal liability per each occurrence". We decided to go for the lowest cost provider to meet these minimum requirements and got the best deal from Allstate Insurance thru:

Jim Fox
1700 Great Neck Rd. Suite 101
Copiague, NY 11726

The name of our insurance agent working for Jim Fox is Anna Stankiewicz

The Tel. # of the Company is 1-888-538-6770

The agent was very professional and her service was super fast, done mostly electronically, except for a first tel. call and final insurance documents sent both electronically and via regular mail. The agent provided the required insurance information also to Related and to our broker. Here are some details of what we got in the insurance package for our $180 insurance:

Personal Property Protection $43,300 coverage
Personal Property Reimbursement included
Family Liability Protection $300,000/occurrence
Guest Medical Protection $1,000/person included
Building Property Protection $10,000
Off Premises Theft Elimination included
Property Insurance Adjustment included
Additional Living Expense up to 12 months included
Deductibles Amount for All Peril $1,000


Additional Coverages:
Workers' Comp - Occasional Included

Policy Premium Summary Total Estimated Annual Premium* $ 180.00

I would suggest starting by finding out the Condo building insurance requirements.

Good luck to you in finding a good agent.

Well, I am no insurance expert, but the policy quoted by CST13 sounds more like a renters policy than a condo policy. There is no quoted insurance for unit itself, but only (rather modest) personal effects coverage and some liability insurance. $180 of insurance sounds, well, like $180 worth of insurance.

For some of these issues, you need to talk to an agent. You should have coverage for the unit itself for at least what it would cost to rebuild from empty masonary walls and floors -- maybe a few hundred dollars per square foot mor or less depending upon what sort of place you are talking about. You need contents coverage based on what you own. If you have any expensive items (art, jewelry, antiques, etc.) you may need to insure or itemize separately. In my view, having liability insurance under $1MM (or several million) is crazy.

nyc_sport: You are absolutely right in the sense that I should have added that the insurance should meet the requirement of those buying it!!! I missed on that point. In our case, at this time our apartment is only frugally furnished and $43,000 is more than we need for our personal effects coverage. The insurance of the building covers every defficiency caused by a malfunction in the building and our neighbours insurances cover a minimum of $300,000 loss to us for every occurance (and to every other neighbour). We are no smokers and we believe that at this time our insurance more than covers our needs. The building is also new. We are have no reason to believe that we will cause damage to the building or to our neighbours property. Yes, ephraim's insurance should meet his needs!

IMO, having a really good insurance broker is almost as important as the quality of the insurance co. A really good broker will look at your entire life (not just your condo) & tell you what insurance should be carrying.