Tenant insurance
Your landlord insures the building. Nothing in that policy covers your belongings, your liability, or the hotel bill if the unit above you floods yours in January.
Your landlord’s policy is not yours
Tenant insurance is the cheapest serious policy in Canada and the one most often skipped. Not because people decide against it, but because they assume the building policy reaches them. It does not, and the two claims that prove it are both common: someone else’s water coming down through your ceiling, and your own kitchen fire spreading to four other units.
The first one costs you your belongings. The second one is the reason the liability limit matters more than the contents limit.
What it covers
Your contents
Everything you would take with you if you moved. Most people underestimate this by half until they list it. A studio full of ordinary things reaches $25,000 faster than it sounds.
Personal liability
The important half. If a fire or an overflow that starts in your unit damages the building and your neighbours’ units, this is what answers for it. We place $2 million as standard because the arithmetic of a multi-unit building does not work at $1 million.
Additional living expenses
Somewhere to sleep while your unit is repaired, and the difference between your rent and the short-term rate you have to pay.
Off-premises coverage
Your laptop stolen from a café in Halifax, your bicycle taken from outside a shop on Commercial Drive, your luggage lost between Winnipeg and Whitehorse.
Sewer backup for basement units
If you rent a basement apartment, this is not optional in any meaningful sense. It is the exact loss that happens to basement units.
Roommates and students
A roommate is not automatically covered by your policy. A student living away from a parent’s home often is, partly, under the parent’s policy. Both situations are worth two minutes on the phone.
What it does not cover
An honest policy is read by its exclusions too. These are the ones that cause the most surprises.
- The building itself, its systems and its structure. That is your landlord’s policy.
- A roommate who is not named on the policy.
- Damage from a flood or a sewer backup if you did not add the endorsement.
- Anything you run as a business out of the unit.
Ten minutes on the phone, or fill in the quote and we will come back with three markets.
Tell us your province. The rest follows.
A ten minute request, a named broker, and an answer that starts with what your province already covers.