Your builder built forty. You'd rebuild one.

This is the most common assumption on a new build and it is worth examining, because knowing exactly what you paid feels like knowing exactly what you would need.

Build cost and rebuild cost are different numbers. Your builder put up a group of houses at once, with bulk material pricing, one crew moving between lots, one mobilisation and shared overhead. Rebuilding your house alone means retail pricing, a contractor mobilising for a single job, and no economies of scale at all. Rebuilding also starts with work that was never part of building. The damaged structure has to be demolished and the debris removed before anything goes up, and the replacement has to meet whatever building code is current at that point rather than the code in force when the subdivision was permitted. None of that is on your closing statement. It does not mean your limit is wrong. It means the number you are confident about is answering a different question from the one the policy asks.

They are two different instruments and neither one covers the other's territory.

A builder warranty is a contract with your builder about workmanship, materials and defects, running for whatever period that particular contract specifies. Homeowners insurance responds to sudden accidental loss, such as fire, wind, hail or a burst pipe. Faulty workmanship and construction defect are generally excluded from a homeowners policy, and a warranty is not going to respond to a hailstorm. So there is a gap between them, and it is worth knowing where it falls before something happens rather than during. Two practical points. Read your actual warranty document rather than relying on what you were told at closing, because terms vary widely between builders. And if something looks like it might be a defect, raise it with the builder inside the warranty period rather than waiting. We are not able to interpret your warranty contract for you, but we can tell you plainly what the insurance side does and does not reach.

A handful of things, and none of them are unusual.

Landscaping and fencing are often installed after closing, so they may not be reflected on a policy written at the loan table. The same goes for a shop, a shed, a pool or a detached garage added in the first couple of years, all of which sit under other structures coverage and are frequently left at a default percentage nobody revisited once the yard actually got built. Water backup and service line coverage are excluded by default on a standard policy regardless of how new the house is, and both are inexpensive to add. Settling and cracking in the early years is a maintenance and warranty question rather than an insurance one. None of these are alarming. They are simply the specific things that change in the first years of a house, and a policy written at closing does not update itself as they happen.

Four lines, and the first one is the local one described above.

Then the loss settlement provision and the endorsement list, for anything affecting how a roof or other major component is paid. Then the deductible section, to see whether there is a separate wind and hail figure and whether it is expressed as a percentage of your dwelling limit rather than as a flat amount, because a percentage is a considerably larger number than most people realise. Then the dwelling limit itself, read as what it would cost to rebuild today rather than as what the house would sell for. And finally your liability limit, which is almost always a default nobody chose. Those cover most of what actually goes wrong on a home policy. If you would rather someone else read it, send us the declarations page or upload it to Coverage Compare and you will get a written answer without anyone ringing you about it.

No.

A fair number of the reviews we do end with us saying the policy is already right, and that is a perfectly good outcome. We would rather be the agency you call in three years when something has changed than the one that pushed you into moving before there was a reason to. What a review costs you is the time it takes to find your declarations page and a short conversation. What it is worth is knowing where you stand rather than assuming. If it turns out that a different market fits your house better, we will say so and show you why. If it does not, you will have spent twenty minutes and learned what your policy actually does, which is more than most homeowners can say.

Because appetite differs enormously between companies, and a single company can only ever offer you its own answer.

A captive agent has one carrier's rules to work with, so when that carrier does not want a house, or prices it oddly, there is nothing else to point at. We place business across more than forty carriers, which means the same property gets looked at by several sets of rules rather than one. That matters most on the houses that are not straightforward, which in this region is a great many of them. It also means we are able to tell you that your current coverage is already competitive, because we have nothing to gain from moving it if it is. What it costs you is a declarations page and a conversation.