Originally Posted by
minimoke
Sorry to hear of your loss Serpie. Congratulations on being wise enough to have comprehensive insurance.
At a broad level I think you can expect EQC to pay out two cheques for $100,000. These cheques will go to your bank for your mortgage. If your mortgage on a property is less than $100,000 you'll get the difference.
The house part is probably relatively simple. Your insurance will likely pay to rebuild it to its original state using current materials. So you'll probably get single glazed timber framed windows replaced with a single glazed aluminium windows. Your insurance will also likely pay the demolition and removal of the old house. So say you have a 150sqm house, at a rebuild of $1,000 a sqm tyyour insurance company will pay $50,000 - teh othe $100,000 comig form EQC.
What I'm not clear about is how much the insurer will spend on land remediation. If you are in an area of liquefaction (where they are talking about building dams) council and governement will pay for that so your property gets some benefit. But what if you had 100 cubic metres of silt shoveled off your back yard (like some properties I know) thats a lot of potential problem lurking under the surface. I've no idea who will pay to get that fixed.
Either way your insurer does have the option of simply settling with you. They might figure its easier to offer you $50,000 cash (plus cash fo rthe loss of rent) in full settlement - or some other figure. If this happens you get the cash (and the $100,000 EQC money) and keep the land and property. This means you have to demolish and remove the property at your own cost (remember the "House of Horrors?) and you'll be responsible for the rates on the property until you sell it.
Clearly you're going to have to look closely at your Policy and get very good advice. I'd imagine the insurers are going to look closely at their exclusions. Remember after September how the insurance companies tried to claim the immediate after shocks as second events so that EQC would cough up two lots of $100,000.
Which leads me back to my original post. Are landlords underinsured - resulting in potential slum replacements. Or, as you have raised, will landlords take the money and run leaving decaying bomb sites for years to come.