Hello, my name is Lance Mohr and I am a real estate agent in Tampa and I want to talk to you today if you are looking at viewing waterfront homes in Tampa. If you are, most people out there when I talk to them about waterfront whether it is lakefront, oceanfront, intra-Bay, etc. or river they have a lot of questions about insurance which is completely understandable

Hazard Insurances

Let me give you a couple of tips on the two different types of insurance you are going to be getting. One of them is hazard insurance and the other is the flood insurance. So first let us talk about the hazard insurance. Florida like every other state out there were controlled by the insurance commissioner and everything is controlled but a lot of times you will get quotes and you can see one quoted whatever it is and then another one with the exact same property and it is quoted at 25 or 30% higher and what tends to happen is what they do here is probably like what they do everywhere but if a company does not want to write a policy a lot of times they will say we are not writing policies right now or they will just give you a really high quote and what they do is they take the replacement costs and the jacket through the roof. Learn more on buying insurance.

Multiple Resources

So you have a home and let us say you’re buying a home on the water and let us say that home is $500,000 and of course the lot is the vast majority of it but the replacement cost is $500,000. Well that is absurd so you want to definitely when you look in an insurance let your fingers do the walking and called several places. I am one of those people, I am a really loyal type of person but when it comes to insurance companies I do not need to tell you how they operate. It is not the agent’s fault who works for them it is the company so definitely shop around.

I always tell people call three or four of them and see what they have to say and it is better to call more in the beginning of the middle of the month because a lot of times the insurance company if they have met their quota for the month maybe they made their quota on the 22^nd you call them up and they will be like, well we are not insuring in Florida right now but if you call them on the second of the month the next month and they are saying, “ Oh we have not met our quota for this month of course we are writing coverage.” Anyhow, just make sure you do that and call around and definitely get quotes and really pay attention to what everything is in the policy about the replacement costs.

Flood Insurance

The second thing is the flood insurance. I know that is a big, big, big issue at least right now at the point of this video because all of the stuff that is going around there so when it comes to flood insurance do not rely on your real estate agent, do not rely on your mortgage loan officer if you are getting a mortgage. The reason is because we don’t have the flood maps; the realtors don’t have the flood maps, the lenders and loan officer levels do not have them. Now of course with the mortgage company the underwriters all have the flood maps but give an insurance agent a call. So what I would do, let’s say I am looking at buying a property and I would say not looking at the Gulf because it is too expensive so I want to buy something intercostal so I’m looking at intercostal.

Take a couple of properties maybe two or three depending on the area I am looking and just call an insurance agent you do not have to call all of them to get an exact quote right now. I will call the insurance agent and say hey here are a couple of addresses, can you give me a quote on some flood insurance? They are going to call you back and they are going to say yes this property depending on where it is in zone one, two, three, four or five and they will give you a quote and they will say well this one is a little bit more because of this and it is flood insurance so definitely check it out and call the right person.

I know a lot of times people ask me they will say what is the flood insurance and how much would I be paying for the flood insurance? I know a lot of realtors and they want to seem like they know everything so they will just answer the question not knowing what the heck they’re talking about but make sure you talk to the right person. Take some time and look over this flood insurance rate blog.

Contact Me

I hope this helps. If you have any questions about waterfront homes, homes in general, or anything about real estate in Tampa give me a call at 813-317-4009, I would love to talk to you and help you. I would love to work with you. So I am doing a bunch of these videos series so you can certainly look on my channel or just type in the search on YouTube and look for my videos. Check out my Facebook or go to my website Tampa2Enjoy for more videos and all the free information you want. Have a great day thank you, best of luck to you.