It’s not your property they care about. They usually want this because it includes liability insurance if you damage their property or someone else’s, or your negligence causes harm to someone.
For anything not covered, where a tenant does damage thats what the bond is for.
Renter insurance should be optional.
Actually I’m surprised that landlord insurance is not already occurring, imagine a building with 100 apartments, I’m sure the bank would ask the landlord to have a single cover over 100’s of little crappy policies.
If renter insurance is required by regulations, this is likley another good target for policy change.
Americans really do get screwed in so many ways.
You’d just end up with some giant uncollectable judgement against you if you ended up burning down the apartment complex via negligence. Landlords insurance company would potentially come after you, but probably not since it would not be worth their time for most tenants.
Landlords/owners have their own fire and liability insurance (ultimately paid for by the tenants as part of their rent); it's unnecessary to demand that the tenants provide their own. Renter's insurance is for the tenant's protection, not the landlord's.
My leases always point out that the landlord's insurance does not cover the tenant's personal property or liability, and recommend renter's insurance. But it's not required.
I generally agree, obviously for a "burn the place down" incident the renter's policy is going to be rather inconsequential, and likely not even actionable.
But for more "medium" stuff like "flood the unit below me because I left the bath on and left for work" where the liability is in the low $10k's, that's where I see landlords (and their covering policies) wanting the renter's insurance to kick in and cover.
I personally find it a bit slimey - if you're a landlord this is just part of the risk of being a landlord. If you don't have the capital to cover such incidents, then you should simply not be a landlord. Sorry.
Trying to squeeze an extra few dollars per month out of tenants is ridiculous, but seems to be the way everything is going when you get hyper-financialization and PE type firms buying multiple buildings.
However, it is landlord and location dependant - it's pretty much the norm in NYC, for example (see https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNYC/comments/11bl350/does_your_a...).
Absolutely. I assumed the parent was talking about the US because that's the only place in the world I've encountered this.
In NZ we are not required to have third party medical cover because everyone is already covered by yearly car registration fee.
In the past (and still today but less so), that literally meant black people. Now it mostly means poor people of all races.
It's been shown over and over that it's practically an American cultural value to accept lower benefits to yourself in trade for denying benefits to what you see as an undeserving group.
I used my insurance company I already had.
But even if it is true, I think the price of the insurance (or at least some reference value for comparison, assuming there are multiple competing offers) should be included in the sticker price.
For the same reason, purchase-money lenders (in a buy-vs-lease situation) typically require the debtor to hold a comprehensive insurance policy until the vehicle is paid off. It protects their interest.