House insurance

Amaury
Updated on 28.06.2022

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What is it ?

The house insurance I will speak about here is your bog-standard house insurance, to protect the property from things like a leak, an earthquake, electricity damage, drunk friends – the basics. You will be requested to insure your rental property before moving in, and if you are the homeowner, well, you’ll want to do it to cut down on potential later costs.

What does it cover ?

Your basic house insurance will cover for disasters such as fire, water damage, frozen pipes, natural disaster and storm, burglary and vandalism, broken windows, drunk friends. It will also cover your furnitures.
Your cash or your car will need to be covered by a specific insurance.

Is it mandatory to get a house insurance ?

Let’s make it simple, it’s not mandatory in every case BUT to avoid great costs if anything happens and sleep quietly it’s better to get one. Most people will ask you for one

House insurance as a tenant

As a tenant, most of the time, your tenant will ask you to subscribe to insurance.

House insurance as homeowner

As a homeowner, you’ll have to get insurance when you buy your place. That’s mandatory when you buy property.

If you rent your place out, you’ll have to subscribe to a Propriétaire non-occupant insurance. In France, some damages are the responsibility of the tenant and some of the owner. This means that even if you’re not in the place, you could have to pay for some sinisters.

When you rent your place out, you’ll have two options. Either your tenants take their own insurance, or you can subscribe one for them and have them pay the cost back to you every month.

Why is there a civil liability (responsabilité civile)

attached ?

The civil liability helps to avoid greater cost on your own finance if you cause any damage.

French law dictates that you’re responsible if any harm comes to other due to your actions or because of things you own. Meaning that even if you’re on holiday and an unexpected leak happens and floods the downstairs neighbour, you’re responsible and have to make up for the harm done or the damaged goods.

What to do in case of a disaster ?

Alert your insurer as soon as you can, even if the disaster is still ongoing.
In the case of a burglary, go to the police station to complain and send a copy of the complaint to your insurer.
Take pictures of the damages.

In every contract, there is a “franchise”, a minimum amount to pay. If the amount to cover is over that franchise, that’s the only thing you’ll pay, usually it’s around 200€.

How to get a house insurance ?

How does it work ?

Get on the website or on your phone and just fill the documents out.

It’s quite easy to contract to get insurance, but a bit less to cancel it. Make sure you check the conditions to get out.

What do you need ?

A bank account to take your monthly payments from. This means a RIB (relevé d’information bancaire)
Some information about the place (size, date of build, address etc.)
Details about the furnitures

Which one to choose ?

The most classic option is to get home insurance via your bank – they usually offer it when you open your account and the options are cheap and efficient.

You can also get in touch with the usual suspects like AXA, Allianz etc.

However you can also shop around, as most services in France, there will always be a new startup that will offer you a service you can control via an app – here are a couple:

Finally, you can compare the price of insurers by clicking there :

Tips and tricks

Make sure to check what is covered before you call any experts like a plumber. With Juliette, we had this problem, a leak appeared in our toilet. We called a plumber that totally misdiagnosed our issue. It wasn’t covered by our insurance and cost us over 4k.

Never call a plumber from the little magnet list that you may find in your mailbox. It’s over charged and some of them are just frauds. It’s better to look for qualified craftsmen on the internet or have your insurance recommend one.