Property owners, landlords and tenants, need to be more diligent during the winter months when it comes to carrying out maintenance checks to their property to avoid damage from heavy rain, storms and cold snaps. But when a property is empty, how do you avoid major winter damage?
When your property is unoccupied, it’s easy to forget certain necessary precautions, which can put your property at risk, this coupled with potential delays in discovering damage can lead to even more extensive damage.
Because of this, insurers view empty properties as riskier, and they typically reduce the level of cover in place once the property has been empty for more than about a month. Some insurers regard the cover as having lapsed entirely.
The simple reason is that an empty property attracts different risks to one that is lived in continuously and your regular insurer may want to avoid those additional risks.
You should also read the terms and conditions with regard to unoccupied properties, particularly over the winter months.
But how do you mitigate the risk of damage when there’s nobody at the property?
Keeping the house, particularly the water pipes, warm enough to avoid them freezing is the most important job. There are three options which will be your main defence for your property against the cold:
Your insurer is likely to request that the empty property is visited and inspected on a regular basis and a log of such inspections kept. This might be done by friends or relations or reliable neighbours, although it is also a service offered by a growing number of security and property management companies.