Home Contents Values Increase But Many Homeowners Don’t Have Enough Home Insurance Cover

Whilst home contents values have increased, homeowners are not properly calculating the value of their home contents and are leaving themselves underinsured and don’t have enough home insurance cover.

According to Confused.com, homeowners valued home contents at £4,995 fifteen years ago and today they believe they have an average of £10,717 worth of contents. However, the true average value of contents in a home is around £50k, meaning homeowners are underinsured by 79%.

The increase in home contents values is attributed to a shift in items considered ‘most important’ to homeowners over this time period. For example, 15 years ago, items such as the hostess trolley, fax machine and soda stream were high on the most important items list but today it’s all about gym equipment, plasma TV’s and iPods.

With modern day technologies taking over in the home, Confused.com has created an iPhone application ‘Home Calc’ which takes the confusion out of content calculations. iPhone owners can log their contents onto a centralised portal which will provide a true picture of the valuables they own – helping them to make sure they get adequate home insurance.

Darren Black, head of home insurance at Confused.com said: “What fills our home changes every year with continuous new must-have gadgets. As the British public buy more and more of these items, the content value of our home increases year on year.

To help customers we have created an iPhone application which will help people assess the value they have under one roof and the type of cover they will need to insure it all. Underinsurance is still a massive problem with the research highlighting 79% of our contents are still overlooked. I hope people take advantage of the new way to calculate  contents, which will dramatically reduce this alarming figure.”

It’s estimated that 10% of homeowners will save specifically to buy the latest technologies for their home, making it all the more important to be accurate with content values and to buy home insurance to cover the full amount.