I am an avid DIYer! I have renovated a number of houses including building decks, recladding, installing new windows, relining interior walls and renovating the odd bathroom. I thought this gave me a fairly good handle on what the rebuild cost of my own house would be with the change in the insurance from sq/m to Sum Insured.
I was wrong!
I recently had my house valued by Construction Cost Consultants and found my sum insured was $700,000 out!! In the unfortunate event that something happened to my house I would not have been able to come up with that sort of money to rebuild what I had. Instead I would have been well short, which is the same scenario for over 50% of homeowners!
The statistics are quite staggering on how many homeowners have simply gone with the insurers default calculation - some insurers say 80% of their customers have not reviewed or amended this, even after being contacted. This means there are a lot of people out there who are grossly underinsured.
Since the changeover there have been many companies starting to provide residential rebuild valuations. I have seen many different ones in my role and there are definitely some that stand out from the others. I personally used Construction Cost Consultants for this reason, their reports were so much more comprehensive than any of the others, they stood out as a company that really knew what they were doing.
After getting the valuation I sleep much better at night knowing I have my house insured at its correct rebuild value.If anything were to happen, I could rebuild my home to the same standard.