Are Landscaping Features Covered by Home Insurance?

For many people, the investment in their home starts outside. You’ve installed beautiful landscaping surrounding your home. You have raised garden beds, beautiful waterfalls, and perhaps even a pond added to the layout. You love the way your home looks now, but do you have the right type and amount of home insurance to help protect these valuable investments? Your landscaping may or may not be a part of your home insurance plan and it’s important to know now if it isn’t in place.

What Does Home Insurance Cover? 
Most of the time, your standard home insurance policy can provide protection for some components of your landscaping. This includes plants, trees, and shrubs up to some level. It may protect these types of components from risks such as fire, vandalism, riot, theft, damage brought on by another person’s vehicle, and even lightning. In many situations, the plan should limit the amount of landscape coverage you have, such as at a value of 10 percent of the home’s insurance coverage.

What happens if you have more expansive or higher value landscaping? If you’ve installed bigger features throughout your landscaping, this can add value to your home. However, these may not be covered outright in your standard policy. You may need to purchase an additional rider or obtain coverage that offers a high enough limit to protect you from losses. When you work with your home insurance agent, you can specifically include most types of assets.

Keep in mind that some assets raise your risks (and therefore your costs) as well. For example, if you install a pond in your backyard, you may boost the value of your home. But, you also are adding a risk to the space because someone can drown in it. Any time you add a risk like this, update your home insurance policy to reflect it. Otherwise, if something should happen, it is unlikely that you’ll have the comprehensive protection you need to pay for the losses.

Working with your home insurance provider, you can customize your home insurance to reflect the value of your landscaping. And, after all of the hard work and money you’ve invested in this space, it may be well worth doing just that!

Need more information? Call Shankland Insurance at 641-228-7436 for a Charles City home insurance quote.