David Price,
Executive Vice President and Chief Underwriting Officer
Burns & Wilcox
It is 60 days for accounts that Burns & Wilcox handles. After that, you usually need to shift to a vacant-property policy.
The 60-day criteria provides a reasonable amount of time so a resident can take a vacation or a landlord can hold off reoccupancy to upgrade or remodel a property without switching to a vacant-property policy.
Be aware that the treatment of vacant property does vary, depending on the rules of the insurance carrier and the criteria or flexibility of the underwriter. For example, standard-market insurers usually rely on policy language specified by the Insurance Services Office (ISO), which does not use a cutoff date to determine whether a property is considered vacant. Instead, ISO suggests including a penalty clause in a regular property policy. The clause states that if a building is vacant at the time of a covered loss, the owner is paid only 80 percent of what would normally be covered. There is no distinction between a building vacant a day or a year if there’s a loss.