3 Tips on Reading Home Insurance Reviews

Consumers use home insurance reviews as a means of determining the quality of home insurance companies before deciding whether or not to take a closer look. If a particular company’s home insurance ratings are low in the eyes of existing or past customers, it’s taken as a word of warning to prospective customers to stay away—or to look elsewhere first. On the other hand, a strong endorsement can be the deciding factor that serves to warrant closer inspection. Using public reviews as a home insurance guide can be tricky. The 3 tips below will show you how to navigate that tricky terrain to help you separate the substantial from the insubstantial.
 

1. Consider the Source: These days, the internet’s made it easy to find information you wouldn’t otherwise have access to without doing a great deal of reading up, calling around, and soliciting of word of mouth. There are official insurance company websites, as well as a huge variety of message boards and complaint forums. But when you’re reading home insurance reviews for qualified opinions about a particular company’s reputation, check the source before making a decision. In many cases you may come across glowing reviews that have been written by the insurance providers themselves. Other times you’ll read something written by an individual that’s got a very obvious axe to grind. Take both extremes with a grain of salt.
    
2. Verify the Claims Made: This requires you to do a little more legwork (or finger work, as it were, since you’re looking all this stuff up online) but the results can be illuminating. They can also help greatly in your efforts to separate fact from fiction from outright exaggeration. If you happen to come across information posted online by someone claiming to have been horribly wronged by a particular insurance company, don’t automatically take it at face value. Do a bit more digging for specifics. You may be able to find related news stories or rebuttals from the company itself that’ll serve to offer a more balanced viewpoint and help shed some light on both sides of the story.
    
3. Check the Company’s Financial Standing: Home insurance ratings from existing and former customers are only a part of the big picture, and shouldn’t be relied on solely to base your decision. Home insurance reviews rarely, if ever, touch upon one of the most important factors to take into consideration: the insurance company’s financial strength. You can accomplish this by using one of several online resources that’ll help you determine if the insurer you’re considering doing business with is financially strong—a very important factor, considering that if something happens to your home they’ll be responsible for paying out. AM Best is an international company that rates the creditworthiness and financial standing of the insurance industry. All that’s required is to register a user ID with AM Best’s website http://www.ambest.com/ and you can get access to this information. You can also perform a search engine query on the insurance company, and filter your results to display only news stories. If the insurance company in question has been in the news lately, this is where you’ll find the most useful information to help you arrive at your decision.