After months of planning & ensuring everything is good with the city in terms of developing 2 extra bedrooms downstairs to double my rental income, I find out that Canadian residential home insurance companies absolutely refuse to insure more than 2 rented rooms under a regular homeowner policy. My home insurance is $1,354 annually & only $75 of that is the cost of having $5M in liability coverage for the 2 renters. However when someone has 4 rented rooms they need to get 'commercial insurance' as it becomes a rooming house.
Multiple insurance companies that I've checked over the weeks refuse to give a quote for this type of insurance until I'm 'ready to rent out 4 rooms'; I'm getting the impression they just don't want the hassle of dealing with underwriting unless it's completely necessary. However, one broker gave me a ballpark figure that the premium would be about $8K a year & the coverage would be less (no replacement cost, less perils covered, etc)!
Talk about a ripoff. You can't tell me that having 4 grown adults living in my house is an exponentially higher risk than, say, if I was a single dad with 4 teenaged kids living in the house. The only difference is that my housemates are not family & I collect money in exchange for living with them.
To put it into perspective, that's $80,000 in insurance premiums over 10 years (that I'll never get back). Who even knows if insurance would even pay if I had a loss? Insurance companies won't tell you their adjudication practices & qualifications for specific types of claims because it's 'proprietary information'. I even know of one immediate family member still trying to collect on a significant property loss that they were 'covered for' but even after 2 years, he's still dealing with rejections due to 'fine print'.
I attempted to think 'outside the box' too. I asked if I had 2 housemates rent 1 room (I can easily make a receipt show that each housemate rents 1/2 a bedroom, and where they choose to sleep is up to them really). Nope, there's a limit of 2 'families' that I can rent out to. Meaning unless I rent 1 room to 2 siblings, or a legally married couple, I'm out of luck.
I even asked if I could have 2 insurance company insure the house - one for the main floor, while another separate company covered the basement only. Nope, that doesn't work either.
However, I did confirm with my current insurer that I would still be covered if I "had a non-family member visit me, and was sleeping in one of the basement rooms at the time of a loss". So I'll see what I can do with that. I guess I could just keep the 2 rented rooms at $1,200/month. It isn't $2,400 - but it's still pretty decent. Still, $2,400/month would be an extra $144,000 over 10 years.
There's always an option of making a pet sitting business too
. Cat owners would probably be thrilled for their felines to have a 150 square foot bedroom all to themselves.
February 2016 housing costs:
Natural Gas - $126.54
Electricity - $86.97
Water - $97.31
Other expenses:
Telephone - $41.07
Wifi - $60.45
Netflix - 8.99
Insurance - $112.83
Water Heater Rental - $9.63
Property Tax - $310.17
Mortgage P+I - $717.31
Total February '16 Housing Costs:
$1,571.27
Rent collection from housemates:
$1,200.00
Monthly Deficit:
$371.27