Coach Houses are built on 3 floors; Similar to townhouses, except the ground floor is a single garage. This is a popular and space-saving option for home builders to incorporate all the facilities a modern family needs by using smaller plots of land to provide them. Therefore, housing construction is considered economically economical. Affordable home construction means affordable home prices! Everyone is a winner with this new space saving concept!
This property layout is usually smaller, with only 1 or 2 bedrooms; 3-bedroom carriage houses are rare, but we’re seeing more being built lately.
Carports are typically 3 properties (although in some connected cases there may be more), one homeowner will be responsible for securing all garages that the carriage house is built on and may request that other homeowners, who will have access to their garage with a 999-year lease, you will pay a contribution to the insurance costs, although the policy is not exclusive to garages and will include your home too! However, it is considered reasonable that the policyholder could request around 25% from each of the other owners of the garage to cover the costs of their buildings insurance.
This is an effective way to share the cost of insurance and protect the legal liability of each agency. However, the other homeowners will also need to have their own Coach House buildings insurance policy, to insure their own home (excluding the garage, of course, which is leased through your neighbor). Hard to follow? It may be unless they gave you some good advice! You’ll need to spell out the details of how everyone should protect themselves and their property from being uninsured in the event of a claim! This tends to be when policyholders realize they are uninsured, just in case they file a claim!
There are also typically significant areas of shared driveway space with these parcels, and this liability should be included in the garage owner’s policy that also insures the garages.
Policies are available to cover these risks, although they can be hard to find! There aren’t many available on the market, so it may take time to find the right policy for you. The most important thing is to make sure that the insurance policy you choose includes all these risks and that the insurance provider is fully aware of the construction, the configuration of the leases and the shared responsibilities involved. Without investing the proper time, making sure you purchase the correct buildings insurance policy, it could result in you discovering that you do, in fact, have no insurance should you come in to make a claim.