Where to Start Shopping Online for Renters Insurance

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll say it again. Renters need renters insurance.

Your landlord’s insurance doesn’t cover you at all. So if your apartment building is blown away by a hurricane, you’re out of luck if you don’t have insurance.

Even if you think your personal belongings aren’t worth the insurance premium, you should consider insurance. If someone slips and falls in your apartment, can you afford to pay the medical bills? If you forgot to turn off the stove on your way out and the building burns down, what will happen when the landlord and tenants demand remuneration?

Granted, these are unlikely events. But having insurance that covers your personal liability will give you peace of mind.

Now that you know that you need it, you’re probably wondering where and how to get it.

Now that we live in a dot-com society, you’ll be thrilled to know that you can actually shop for your insurance on the Web. InsWeb (https://www.insweb.com) provides renters with renters insurance quotes. You type in your address and the options you’re looking for, and InsWeb finds you an insurance company and even a local agent. You e-mail the agent from the Web site, and the agent sends you back your quote.

The concept is great. In fact, InsWeb boasts more than 2 million completed shopping sessions last year for all kinds of insurance.

In reality, however, the site doesn’t turn up many renters insurance quotes, despite the fact that it has relationships with about 50 insurance companies. Many of my searches for various states around the country only turned up one or two companies to provide quotes. And it doesn’t cover Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Yet the site is very high-tech and even has an online chat feature if you need help.

When I didn’t know how to fill out one of the forms, I clicked the Live Help button and chatted via a live-chat window with someone who told me what to do. It took a few minutes to connect to the person but seemed more efficient than a phone call. In all, I spent about 10 minutes filling out forms before sending off my e-mail to the agent I’d selected.

InsWeb is helpful when you want online quotes. But Insure.com (https://www.insure.com) is the place to go when you have questions about renters insurance. For example, if you live in California and want to get an estimate for how much earthquake insurance will cost, you can use Insure.com’s California Earthquake Authority Rate Finder, a handy tool that allows you to compare the cost of different amounts of coverage in your ZIP Code area.

You may want to learn more about the difference between actual cash value versus replacement-cost insurance options. Or, you may not know how much liability coverage you should get. These issues and more are discussed in the renters section of the site (https://www.insure.com/home/renters.html).

Many other renter Web sites provide information about renters insurance. Rent.Net (https://www.rent.net), for example, has helpful information about flood insurance from its featured provider, Allstate. And most of the other major insurance companies have a Web presence, though those Web sites normally only help you find an agent and don’t provide an online quote.

In the end, your handy-dandy Yellow Pages phone book is probably going to be the biggest help in your renters insurance quest. Nothing beats just dialing up and asking for quotes--yet.

But it won’t be long before Web sites like InsWeb surpass the old-fashioned telephone receiver in the efficiency category. And if you simply love the novelty of Web shopping, why stop at renters insurance? Why not pick up auto, life and health insurance while you’re at it?

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Send questions to lherman@shaysnet.com, or Leta Herman, Inman News Features, 1250 45th St. Suite 360, Emeryville, CA 94608.