Home insurance

Three separate coverages apply to a house here, and they are often confused with one another.

Three separate coverages

A homeowners policy covers the usual perils, and at this location it includes windstorm and hail. The state insurance department says: "If you live anywhere in Texas, except along the coast, you probably have wind and hail coverage in your homeowners policy."¹ Many carriers set a separate, higher deductible for wind and hail, which is different from excluding them.¹

Flood is not covered by a homeowners policy. "Most homeowners and renters insurance do not cover flood damage."² Flood is a separate policy, through the National Flood Insurance Program or a private company.³ It does not take effect for 30 days.² The main exception is flood coverage bought as part of taking out or renewing a mortgage, which starts immediately.²

Separate windstorm coverage is a coastal product, and this is not the coast. The Texas Legislature set up the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association to cover "the seacoast territory of this state" and left the boundary to the insurance commissioner.⁴ That boundary is the fourteen first-tier coastal counties plus "parts of Harris County east of Highway 146".⁵ The department's Harris County map narrows it to land east of SH 146 and inside the city limits of Seabrook, La Porte, Shoreacres, Pasadena and Morgan's Point.⁶ Timberwood is roughly forty miles from there.

A property outside a mapped high-risk flood zone can still flood. Nationally, 29 percent of flood claims from 2014 to 2024 came from outside the high-risk areas,⁷ and "more than half of homes flooded by Hurricane Harvey were outside of designated flood zones."³ See flooding.

Worth knowing

• An elevation certificate "shows how high a building is compared to how high local floodwaters are expected to get". It no longer sets a flood rate, and it "can identify discounts". Most homeowners outside a high-risk zone do not need one to buy a policy.⁸ It is also the document a surveyor or engineer prepares for a Letter of Map Amendment, which corrects a wrong flood zone. FEMA charges nothing to review a LOMA and usually answers in 60 days, and the surveyor is the cost.⁹
• Roof age affects both premium and claim payment. A policy can pay the full cost to replace a roof, or it can pay actual cash value, which "pay[s] less if the roof is older or showing wear", and "as roofs age, some companies will switch to actual cash value".¹⁰ Roof jobs are recorded in Services.
• Percentage wind and hail deductibles are calculated against the insured value, not the claim. The state's example: a home insured for $150,000 with a 5 percent deductible has a $7,500 deductible, so "if the home needed $6,500 in roof repairs, Policy B would not pay anything".¹¹

Still needed

• Which carriers neighbors here use, and what they pay
• Who has filed a flood or hail claim, and how it went
• Whether anyone has used a Letter of Map Amendment on a Timberwood property
• Which local adjusters or agents neighbors would use again

See also

• Flooding
• Property taxes
• Storms and outages