Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: How much is your condo insurance? (Eastern Village Cohousing)

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

One of the big steps in cohousing is thinking in larger numbers than most of us 
have had to think about our own housing. One is the leap to making peace with 
$4,000 to $5,000 a month for insurance. And then the fact that you can’t use it 
because if you do, all future premiums will be even higher.

What you build determines all your costs forever. You have to have insurance to 
get construction loans and you have to maintain it to get mortgages. So you are 
in a chicken-and-egg situation. 

(On a hugely different scale, the State of New York decided years ago to be 
“self-funding.” They figured out that no insurance was less expensive than 
establishing reserves and budgeting for disasters. Think about how many 
buildings the state is responsible for and how much each of one those insurance 
policies would cost. Incomprehensible.)

Does the insurance industry do careful accounting when they insure condos or 
are they all the same rate, no matter what? I know cohousing people do think 
about this in many ways, but do they get credit for it from insurance companies?

This is one of those questions that will require big thinking to change an 
industry. Individual communities will have little luck, I think, with just 
price shopping. 

Remember when we were having trouble getting reverse mortgage loans? Cohousing 
is perfect for ensuring the safety of reverse mortgages. But changing the rules 
required a posse to come to Washington to meet with HUD and do lobbying to 
convince HUD.  Several people were involved — Raines Cohen was the one I spoke 
with who was hot on the trail. (It was one of his “Where in the world is Raines 
today" photo shoots on Facebook.)

For designing or renovating architecture for lower risk and thus lower 
insurance premiums, I have found an accessible source. Perplexity. Yes, AI. It 
has the best answers I’ve ever been able to find on real estate—and I Iike to 
do research. I now use Perplexity every day, often several times a day. I just 
ran this search to get a list of things that lower risk and insurance rates:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-can-condominium-design-ide-tSIOA6G6ShumGsxtscpw8w

The response is long and detailed, so I can’t copy it here, but I encourage 
everyone to take a look. It would take an effort to detail the risk-lowering 
features for an insurance company that you have included — we have to convince, 
not just ask. And find agents who will want to take this on. 80% will like to 
go with the flow and will not be helpful. They will just say it can’t be done.

A turning point in the 1990s in getting cohousing construction loans was a 
spreadsheet done by, I think, Muriel, of all the banks that had already given 
loans to cohousing communities. It was used to convince banks that cohousing 
communities had already been financed by their own bank and many other banks. 
“Many” in this context may have been 12-18, but in the 1990s, that made a 
better argument than 0. (Please add the name of the person who made the 
spreadsheet of banks if Muriel is not correct.) 

Form a posse. Find one person in one or more communities to collect data. 
Compile it in a spreadsheet and target one or two insurance companies. 

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Riderwood Village, Silver Spring MD
Founding member and 25 years of service in Takoma Village, Washington DC

For extra credit:
A posse is a group of people, historically summoned by a lawman to assist in 
preserving public peace, often used in search-and-rescue contexts or 
colloquially to mean a close-knit group of friends or an entourage. Originating 
from the medieval Latin term posse comitatus 
<https://www.google.com/search?q=posse+comitatus&oq=posse&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDIwNzBqMGo3qAIIsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ved=2ahUKEwje7-bwv8CTAxVsk4kEHVzZPPgQgK4QegYIAQgAEAY>
 ("power of the county"), it now often refers to any group gathered for a 
shared purpose or a “squad.”