Insuring a home not lived in
Hello, My husband and I buy one or two homes a year, renovate it and sell it. Depending on the size of the home, it can take anywhere from three months to six or seven months to get it ready to sell. We usually sell them within a month or two. (Another month by the time we make it to the closing table). He makes the homes way above average with really nice fixtures, show worthy kitchens and master suites, etc. and he knows so much about all forms of construction that if he hires someone, he knows if they are doing the job right. Our tax person told us we should make our business an LLC. So we did a year ago.
Our insurance agent has been wonderful with finding ways for us to be insured with State Farm. We’ve had SF for all our insurance for 30 years. We have been flipping houses for 25 years (we’ve lived in a bunch of them) and my husband does most of the work himself. Lately he has hired out more and more things - roofing, electrical, plumbing, tiling. He also had one employee he used for the last several houses. He was a full time employee. (My husband has another full time job in addition to flipping).
So for years, the agent just added a homeowners insurance policy for the home we were renovating. Then SF started noticing and cancelling one of the policies if we had it more than 60 days or so. So he insured this last one as a rental dwelling policy. We justified it because the full time worker was there every day most of the day, then my husband was there in the evenings most of the time.
We just bought another house on auction, and we aren’t sure if we will be hiring the full time employee. And I just read some things about insurance companies not covering losses if they determine your house is either vacant or unoccupied.
So my question is how to insure this? I don’t know of any company that would want to only insure a house being flipped.