How Brexit might affect your Northern Ireland property insurance

What is passporting in the insurance industry?

So basically, in the past, what you have is – say you took a Spanish insurer. And what you could do is because we’re all part of the same- we’re all part of the European Union. You’re able to passport in so just simply to ensure a risk in the UK. If you’re from Spain, for example, then you don’t have to face any extra regulation. So essentially, the UK would not have been a third country.

Now, UK is the third country. So, therefore, there needs to be some sort of agreement between the EU and the UK as to what they will accept as acceptable regulation. Until they come to an agreement there, there is a third country, there are different regulations, and they need to come to an agreement on that. And basically, passport back in as they would have done in the past. At the moment, they can’t do that. There are buyers, trade buyers to do that, quite simply.

What patterns about Brexit and Northern Ireland property insurance have we noticed so far

What we’re getting at the moment is that there’s a lot of people who go back and forth over the border. So they live in Donegal and work in Derry and vice versa.

So a lot of those customers, for example, would be- they’ll be from let’s say the Derry area because that’s the big one. That’s where I’m from. That’s where all the commuting back and forth goes from so- people live in Donegal and Derry, so you’d maybe have a customer living in Donegal, who has a property in Derry rented out. So you got that landlording going on, so to speak.

So the issue that we’ve seen on a micro-scale is customers actually ringing us and this has actually been quite common- customers are ringing us, saying that their current insurer in the North will not insure their properties because they are not resident in the Republic. So, that’s causing issues. But they come to us, have asked us like, ‘can you do this?’ ‘Yeah, we can- we can do it’. And I think it’s really down to personal choice and certain insurers. They may be thinking there’s gonna be issues going forward. But from our perspective, we’ve had no issue.

We can simply put an address down, from down south and note that their risk or their property insured is in the north. It’s really caused no issues. If you go to an insurer and you say, look, this is- as a non-domiciled person, so to speak, ‘can this be done? More often than not, it’ll be a yes. But what you’ll find with the larger insurers is you’re speaking to an agent on the phone. They’re giving a very dogmatic response to the customers and you know, ‘we can’t do it anymore. So we’ve had quite a lot of customers being turned down by the larger brokers and we’ve taken on the risk, no problems. Maybe they know something we don’t. Whether it’s something further on down the line, but that’s where, on a micro-scale, I would say, that’s where we benefit personally.