Homeowner's Insurance in Rural Maine - Chesterville

[saxnbees]

We have run into a problem and I am wondering if anyone out there has some sage advice to give.

We own two homes. One is in Central New Jersey and the other is in rural Maine in Chesterville. Our current insurance is with a name brand company but year after, their rates have gone up in leaps and bounds. They really don't want to cover us but we are grandfathered in. Although most insurance companies will not cover our house in NJ because it is 4 miles from the ocean, my wife finally found insurance with a major insurance carrier that only sells in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The premium would be roughly $1500 less per year.

This is where the problem comes in. For years, our homeowner's company has provided a Dwelling/Fire policy and extended liability from the NJ homeowner's insurance. Once we cancel our existing homeowner's policy, the insurance company would need to write us a new homeowner's policy with liability coverage. But they refuse to do that. Since the new company does not sell in Maine, they cannot provide any liability insurance for us.

The house in Chesterville is an old post and beam farm house, built in the mid-1800s placed on 100 acres of some fields and mostly trees. It currently has fairly old cedar clap board siding which is peeling in places even though we have repainted it in the last 10 years or so. If it burned to the ground, it would be a loss but we are thinking of building a new home anyway and we would work it out somehow. But without liability insurance, we could possibly be on the hook for $500,000 before our Personal Catastrophe policy would kick in if someone was injured, etc. on our property. We let people hunt on our land so who knows what could possibly happen. Most folks in the neighbourhood have posted their land. We hope to never need it but you buy insurance to cover for the unexpected and with our litigious society I'm not sure I want to gamble like that.

So, we went to an agency and they hit up a bunch of insurance companies. We were told we would probably need a railing on the 3 steps leading to our porch. So I installed one before we sent pictures of the place. Every company supposedly came back saying we would have to repaint the house and barn before they would consider covering us. The house would be easy enough to do in the spring, but we need to move on the insurance now if we are going to. The barn is another matter. It is a fairly large post and beam barn built in 1845. The siding is simply pine boards to keep the weather out. Some of it is still covered with old roll shingle and some is just plain board. Painting the barn would be a fairly big deal.

The other thing they really don't like and which actually may be the crux of the problem, is that our fire department is over 7 miles away and we don't have any fire hydrants, not even connected to a lake. So, we basically don't have any good way to put out a house fire. But other folks in the area must be in the same predicament. A house burned down a mile up the road a few months back. They didn't have insurance so there were some dinners, etc. to raise funds to help them rebuild. Now, I am starting to think that it wasn't their decision to not have insurance but maybe they couldn't find a company that would cover them.

It sounds to me that these companies have people in the city using city standards to determine whether to cover a house. So, I guess my questions are:

1. What would peeling paint or new paint have to do with the structural integrity of a house and barn like that.

2. What do other folks do for home insurance in rural Maine when they own a fairly old house that is not pretty but is still sound and doesn't have modern fire protection that most cities have.

 

[fishheadbob]

Talking to your Maine neighbors may give you a lead ? Also see if you can get just liability?
I pay a lot for insurance as my fire department's motto seems to be "no small fires." No hydrants for miles. One company suggested digging a pond; I figured the pond, besides being expensive, would bump my liability rates too. Sounds like you're painting the house which sits mostly unoccupied, companies don't like that either. Consider not insuring the barn, although I had a similar barn that went up like a roman candle and the company I had was really easy to deal with. I don't think Agway Insurance is still around, likely some connection there. I think the mindset of companies is that a well maintained, owner occupied place is less of a risk, my new company made me do handrails, chimney caps, and a general tidying up, all of which was reasonable.
For a few years an itinerant barn painter from South Carolina would knock on my door and tell me he would paint my barn for X thousand dollars; I would tell him to go away, and the next year he would knock and come down 20% or so. After a few years we struck a deal. His crew showed up hours later with some big spraying rigs and did a good job in a few hours. No detail work, no prep, just a lot of paint. I had to scrape paint off windows, and I had to paint over trim, but he took a job that would have cost me a lot of time and money, made it look easy. Years later it still looks good.

 

[Jstpssng]

The closest office to Chesterville is in Westbrook, but contact Home - F.A. Peabody and they may be able to help you.
They have always been very helpful and seem to go above and beyond to help find insurers.

 

[Diggin It]

As discusses on another thread, homeowner's insurance is a gamble. Another thing you may have against you is that it is not occupied year round. That can be a huge issue for some insurance companies.

First thing would be to contact an agent near the other house and have them run quotes.

If you still can't find anything, end the hunting and fence/gate and post the property. Make it so that no one can legally be on the property without your personal presence. That should keep most problems away, but it won't guarantee anything.

 

[Jstpssng]

^^^^
That's backward logic. If he allows legal use and gets to know a few locals they can keep an eye on the place. Otherwise he has an abandoned building ripe for thieves and vandals.

 

[Slowpoke Slim]

What about Ag insurance for the place in Maine? Are you doing anything with the land, timber, etc, that could creatively be called "Ag"?

 

[oosik]

We had this same situation on our log cabin in AK. There, very simply, was no company that would even touch our property/cabin with ANY type of insurance.
Reason: #1 not on a maintained road #2 over 30 miles from nearest fire station #3 not within any established fire district #4 no local police department to respond to any type of emergency #5 not within any political jurisdiction with any form of rules or regulations

In other words - - EXACTLY where we wanted land and our cabin!!!

However - we knew this going in when we bought the property and built the cabin.

Some times you just have to bite the bullet and take the risk yourself.

 

[BAP]

Insurance companies don’t like peeling paint old houses because of the liability of lead paint. If it is painted over and sealed they are happy. One way to lower cost of your existing policy is to look at the replacement value they are putting on the house. Over time on older houses that number can get way higher than the house is worth due to the automatic inflation adjustments. We owned several 100-150 old houses on the farm and occasionally would tell the insurance agent to manually lower the value to a more realistic value to keep the insurance affordable. It has gotten so that there is few insurance companies that will insure older houses.

 

[Diggin It]

One way to lower cost of your existing policy is to look at the replacement value they are putting on the house.

I'm getting quotes and they have vastly over estimated that part, like probably double what the true cost would be. But they told me they cannot adjust that number - it's system generated based on the data put in. The best they could do is tweak things like finishes and square footage to cause the system to spit out a lower number.

 

[fried1765]

We have run into a problem and I am wondering if anyone out there has some sage advice to give.

We own two homes. One is in Central New Jersey and the other is in rural Maine in Chesterville. Our current insurance is with a name brand company but year after, their rates have gone up in leaps and bounds. They really don't want to cover us but we are grandfathered in. Although most insurance companies will not cover our house in NJ because it is 4 miles from the ocean, my wife finally found insurance with a major insurance carrier that only sells in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The premium would be roughly $1500 less per year.

This is where the problem comes in. For years, our homeowner's company has provided a Dwelling/Fire policy and extended liability from the NJ homeowner's insurance. Once we cancel our existing homeowner's policy, the insurance company would need to write us a new homeowner's policy with liability coverage. But they refuse to do that. Since the new company does not sell in Maine, they cannot provide any liability insurance for us.

The house in Chesterville is an old post and beam farm house, built in the mid-1800s placed on 100 acres of some fields and mostly trees. It currently has fairly old cedar clap board siding which is peeling in places even though we have repainted it in the last 10 years or so. If it burned to the ground, it would be a loss but we are thinking of building a new home anyway and we would work it out somehow. But without liability insurance, we could possibly be on the hook for $500,000 before our Personal Catastrophe policy would kick in if someone was injured, etc. on our property. We let people hunt on our land so who knows what could possibly happen. Most folks in the neighbourhood have posted their land. We hope to never need it but you buy insurance to cover for the unexpected and with our litigious society I'm not sure I want to gamble like that.

So, we went to an agency and they hit up a bunch of insurance companies. We were told we would probably need a railing on the 3 steps leading to our porch. So I installed one before we sent pictures of the place. Every company supposedly came back saying we would have to repaint the house and barn before they would consider covering us. The house would be easy enough to do in the spring, but we need to move on the insurance now if we are going to. The barn is another matter. It is a fairly large post and beam barn built in 1845. The siding is simply pine boards to keep the weather out. Some of it is still covered with old roll shingle and some is just plain board. Painting the barn would be a fairly big deal.

The other thing they really don't like and which actually may be the crux of the problem, is that our fire department is over 7 miles away and we don't have any fire hydrants, not even connected to a lake. So, we basically don't have any good way to put out a house fire. But other folks in the area must be in the same predicament. A house burned down a mile up the road a few months back. They didn't have insurance so there were some dinners, etc. to raise funds to help them rebuild. Now, I am starting to think that it wasn't their decision to not have insurance but maybe they couldn't find a company that would cover them.

It sounds to me that these companies have people in the city using city standards to determine whether to cover a house. So, I guess my questions are:

1. What would peeling paint or new paint have to do with the structural integrity of a house and barn like that.

2. What do other folks do for home insurance in rural Maine when they own a fairly old house that is not pretty but is still sound and doesn't have modern fire protection that most cities have.

My family home is on Cape Cod, and I use it only in summer (6 mo.).
Cape Cod is considered a hurricane zone, and my all wood house there is 288 years old (built 1730).
When the premium was approaching $5000/yr. I told my local agent I would drop all coverage.
After all: I am 78 years old, could afford to build something else, plus, the 12 acres of land will not burn away.
He said let me try to find something for you.
That "something" turned out to be Lloyds of London.
Five years ago the Lloyds premium was $1600/yr. v/s $5000 elsewhere. For 2019 the Lloyds premium is $2100, but the very limited other options are likely now over $6000.

 

[saxnbees]

The closest office to Chesterville is in Westbrook, but contact Home - F.A. Peabody and they may be able to help you.
They have always been very helpful and seem to go above and beyond to help find insurers.

Thank you for the tip. It is possible they may deal with a different set of insurance companies. We will check it out.

 

[dmccarty]

If there is a Farm Bureau in the two states, give them a call. We had some big name insurance company when we lived in the city but when we built our country house the premiums went up so we started shopping. The wife's family has always used Farm Bureau so we gave them a call. They provided the same coverage for less. We use them for all insurance now and when we had some car accidents they were awesome to deal with. Excellent customer service.

Later,
Dan

 

[TheMan419]

Of course one solution would be to keep the current company that you are grandfathered with. It may cost "more" but you are insured rather than uninsured at that point.

I would talk to the locals to the MA house and see what agent they use. not necessarily what insurance company they use, but who is the agent. Deal with that person directly. They know how to navigate the particular insurance issues for that area.

We had troubles with a lender to finance our purchase because it was over some arbitrary number of acres. Had to go to a local small credit union. Also talk to one of those, they will have leads on property insurance companies as well.

 

[saxnbees]

Talking to your Maine neighbors may give you a lead ? Also see if you can get just liability?
I pay a lot for insurance as my fire department's motto seems to be "no small fires." No hydrants for miles. One company suggested digging a pond; I figured the pond, besides being expensive, would bump my liability rates too. Sounds like you're painting the house which sits mostly unoccupied, companies don't like that either. Consider not insuring the barn, although I had a similar barn that went up like a roman candle and the company I had was really easy to deal with. I don't think Agway Insurance is still around, likely some connection there. I think the mindset of companies is that a well maintained, owner occupied place is less of a risk, my new company made me do handrails, chimney caps, and a general tidying up, all of which was reasonable.
For a few years an itinerant barn painter from South Carolina would knock on my door and tell me he would paint my barn for X thousand dollars; I would tell him to go away, and the next year he would knock and come down 20% or so. After a few years we struck a deal. His crew showed up hours later with some big spraying rigs and did a good job in a few hours. No detail work, no prep, just a lot of paint. I had to scrape paint off windows, and I had to paint over trim, but he took a job that would have cost me a lot of time and money, made it look easy. Years later it still looks good.

The neighbours are spread pretty thin and we know only a few. Most of them have newer houses because they are on land that has been subdivided from the old farms. So, their insurance companies may very well be the companies that are resisting coverage.

The changes they are asking for on both houses far outweigh the savings in insurance cost. In NJ, most companies balked because the roof will need to be replaced in a few years along with the fact that we live 4 miles from the shore. There are already two courses of shingles so the roof would need to be stripped. We have been contemplating moving to Maine permanently for many years and maybe this along with the high taxes, overcrowding, etc. will finally push us out of NJ.

In the interim, we may just end up sucking up the high insurance cost and keep our existing coverage. At least we now know that the house in Maine is the stumbling block.

 

[STx]

If I'm reading your post correctly, your biggest concern is the liability if someone is hurt, not so much the house, right? I know things are different up there but in Texas the land is mostly privately owned and trespassing really isn't allowed, even without fencing. So, we have to own land or lease hunting rights to be able to hunt, trespassing with a firearm is a class A misdemeanor, and all hunting leases require a liability policy be purchased by the lessee. What I'm getting at is that there are liability products available for hunting leases only. Maybe a product like that gives you the coverage you need?

Hunting Lease Liability Insurance - American Hunting Lease Association

 

[saxnbees]

^^^^
That's backward logic. If he allows legal use and gets to know a few locals they can keep an eye on the place. Otherwise he has an abandoned building ripe for thieves and vandals.

I agree with you. We have allowed the hunting because we feel the hunters are likely to help keep an eye out. We are now staying there most of the time so that is not as much an issue at this time.

 

[saxnbees]

What about Ag insurance for the place in Maine? Are you doing anything with the land, timber, etc, that could creatively be called "Ag"?

No. In fact we have resisted this. The farm was logged in the past and left ruts everywhere that we are spending a lot of time fixing. We enjoy walking in our woods and would rather keep them as they are. Taxes are relatively cheap there compared to NJ so the savings from any activity like that are not really attractive compared to our desire to keep the woods more natural.

 

[saxnbees]

Insurance companies don稚 like peeling paint old houses because of the liability of lead paint. If it is painted over and sealed they are happy. One way to lower cost of your existing policy is to look at the replacement value they are putting on the house. Over time on older houses that number can get way higher than the house is worth due to the automatic inflation adjustments. We owned several 100-150 old houses on the farm and occasionally would tell the insurance agent to manually lower the value to a more realistic value to keep the insurance affordable. It has gotten so that there is few insurance companies that will insure older houses.

Good suggestions. My wife was an underwriter many years ago so she tends to think along these lines as well. She is handling the insurance so I am going to point her to this thread to see if anything works for us. Time is probably the primary issue at this point. She has spent many hours trying to make this all work. The new insurance in NJ is supposed to take effect but we don't want to pull the trigger permanently until everything is in place. I don't think we thought the house in Maine would be the stumbling block. Now we know better.

 

[saxnbees]

I'm getting quotes and they have vastly over estimated that part, like probably double what the true cost would be. But they told me they cannot adjust that number - it's system generated based on the data put in. The best they could do is tweak things like finishes and square footage to cause the system to spit out a lower number.

Unfortunately, I think this is standard these days. Everything seems to be set up with cities and urban areas in mind. I think you are saying is that it is cheaper to build out in the country. But, since the insurance companies are all based in the cities, that is their view of the world.

This same thinking can be applied to many things. Almost everything assumes that everyone has all of the modern conveniences available. Our high speed internet is only about 7 mps because we only have DSL. There is no cable and no company is going to go to the expense to run cable to us. We don't get a good cell signal and our cell phone carrier has dropped service in our area because it was not cost effective. Someone in the city assumes that police are only a couple of minutes away. So, why would anyone want a gun? We only have a county sherrif's department and state police. It would probably take at least 30 minutes for them to respond to anything. But the folks in the city know best and are trying very hard to force their beliefs on those in rural areas. Life is very different there and has a different set of needs and wants. For quality of life, I really prefer the rural living.

 

[saxnbees]

My family home is on Cape Cod, and I use it only in summer (6 mo.).
Cape Cod is considered a hurricane zone, and my all wood house there is 288 years old (built 1730).
When the premium was approaching $5000/yr. I told my local agent I would drop all coverage.
After all: I am 78 years old, could afford to build something else, plus, the 12 acres of land will not burn away.
He said let me try to find something for you.
That "something" turned out to be Lloyds of London.
Five years ago the Lloyds premium was $1600/yr. v/s $5000 elsewhere. For 2019 the Lloyds premium is $2100, but the very limited other options are likely now over $6000.

Interesting story and solution. We'll have to keep that in mind.