As our working environment becomes ever more litigious, the need for Estate agents to carry professional indemnity insurance is increasingly apparent.
If you are an Estate Agent, Letting Agent or Property Manager seeking cost effective professional indemnity insurance from someone who understands your business, we can help you.
All our quotations are individually underwritten so you can be sure the premium reflects your firm's unique circumstance.
Our policy for Estate Agents, Letting Agents & Property Managers
At Collegiate in addition to providing cover for Estate Agents and Letting Agents who are members of NAEA & ARLA we also offer insurance to those who are unqualified but highly experienced in their field.
Our policy will protect you form the legal liability and legal defence costs you may incur as a result of breaching a duty of care to your clients.
As well as offering full civil liability cover, our policy has several outstanding features that you would not find under a standard policy including:
- Cover for awards under the Estate Agents Ombudsman Scheme.
- Cover for outstanding fees, fidelity and loss of documents.
- Criminal defence costs with regard to any statute that applies to your business e.g. the Property Misdescriptions Act/Estate Agents Act.
Typical Claims relating to Estate, Letting Agents & Property Managers:
- Underselling a property
- Overvaluing a property
- Failure to pass details of an offer to seller
- Lack of clarity about commission fees
- Inadequate financial evaluation of a purchaser's ability to buy property
- Failure to provide adequate supervision for sub-consultants/contractors
- Employee dishonesty
- Issuing a defective rent review notice
- Overstating rental potential
Professional Bodies
The National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA) is the UK's leading professional body for estate agency personnel, and represents the interests of around 10,000 members who practice across all aspects of property services both in the UK and overseas. These include residential and commercial sales and lettings, property management, business transfer, auctioneering and land.
The Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) is a professional self-regulating body solely concerned with lettings. In July 2007 the NAEA amalgamated with ARLA.
It is a compulsory requirement of NAEA membership that all principals, partners & directors hold professional indemnity insurance.
We also have a fully compliant Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) policy for those firms regulated by RICS, for more information please visit the 'surveyors' section of this website.
If you are a member of an Ombudsman scheme it is likely that you are required to maintain professional indemnity insurance.
Previously under the Estate Agents Act 1979 anyone could set up in business as an Estate Agent unless they had been banned by the Office of Fair Trading or were bankrupt.
More recently the Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress (CEAR) Act 2007 requires those engaging in estate agency work (in relation to residential property) to be members of an OFT approved estate agents redress scheme. A requirement of these schemes is that a professional indemnity insurance policy is held.
Lending S&V
We are not insuring any past or present lending surveys or valuations work at the moment, this enables us to keep premiums down for others.
For further information on the cover we provide please click on the Fact Sheet opposite:
All Professional Indemnity Insurance is on a claims made basis, that means you must have an active PI policy at the time a claim or allegation is made against you. It is important to remember that once a PI policy expires you can no longer make any claims against it. Therefore you need to consider maintaining your PI insurance once you cease trading. This is called Run-Off Insurance and provides protection against any claims which may arise from work you undertook in the past. The RICS require all of their members to carry Run-Off insurance for a minimum of six years once they cease trading, and that they consider maintaining it after this period. Run-Off is an annually renewable policy, the premiums will usually reduce each year to reflect the reducing exposure to insurers.
