Personal lines
Home insurance
The policy most people own and fewest people have read. Full Circle can place it with any of eight carriers, which matters more than it sounds when one of them decides it no longer likes your roof.
Four lines on the declarations page decide almost every claim
Dwelling limit, loss settlement, deductible, and what the policy says about water. Everything else is detail. A house insured for what it would sell for rather than what it would cost to rebuild is underinsured on the only day it matters, because the lot is not what burns. Loss settlement is the difference between a cheque that replaces the roof and a cheque that replaces a twenty year old roof, less twenty years. And most standard forms exclude both flood and sewer backup unless somebody adds them on purpose.
What Full Circle will ask you about
How old the roof is and whether it has been replaced. Whether the basement has ever taken water, from outside or from the drain. Whether there is a finished space down there worth insuring. What the service panel and the plumbing are, because carriers rate those hard. And whether anything on the property is unusual enough to need scheduling separately, which is where jewellery and valuable items cover comes in.
Full Circle Insurance, 2559 Brandt School Rd, Suite 101, Wexford. Independent since 2013. Call (724) 935-8000.
Older Western PA housing stock is its own conversation
A good deal of the housing around Wexford and through Allegheny County predates the things carriers now underwrite to. Knob and tube somewhere in the circuit, a fuse panel nobody has touched, galvanised supply lines, a slate or shingle roof past its stated life. None of that makes a house uninsurable. It does mean that the carrier which declines it and the carrier which writes it happily are frequently two different companies.
A captive agent finds out that their one company says no. An independent agency finds out which of eight says yes. That is the whole practical difference, and it shows up most on exactly the houses that have been standing longest.