Insurance considerations for relocation company owners.

What type of insurance does a relocation company need? There’s actually several different types of insurance that a moving company should consider. It depends on what their operations are, for example if your company is doing labor only, in other words you don’t own a truck, then there’s one type of insurance that you should have. If you own your own trucks then there’s other types of insurance that you should consider. But probably the most important one that’s usually required is commercial general liability insurance. What’s covered on a commercial liability insurance policy, whether it be for a moving company or any other type of business for that matter is bodily injury and property damage caused by your work and one other thing is advertising injury, this last one would be for example you say something bad about your competition and you get sued because of that. This insurance is going to help your company to get more jobs, sooner or later you’re going to bid a job and the client is going to ask you if you have liability insurance, so certainly if you say yes and provide a certificate of insurance to prove that you are in fact insured, it’s definitely going to open up the door for you. By the way the limits that you should be carrying are 1 million dollars of liability insurance, anything less is really not going to be enough. The cost of an insurance policy is going to depend on what part of the country you’re in and also what your cost of labor is. For instance if you’re a new business typical costs would probably be around in the range of eight to nine hundred dollars per year, depending if you’re in a rural area of the country. If you’re in New York City you’re going to pay a lot more for your insurance.

There are other types of insurance that you should consider like workers compensation insurance. While the state of California says that if you have employees, you are required to provide them with workers compensation insurance. Other parts of the country it may not be required, so it just depends on your state, some states require it some don’t. There’s also auto liability insurance which covers property damage and/or injuries to another person caused by an accident in which you’re at fault. This coverage is required by most states. Liability coverage is broken down into 2 parts: property damage and bodily injury. Cargo insurance is a must-have for movers too. This will protect your customer’s belongings from physical damage or theft. In fact, insuring cargo ensures that the value of goods are protected against potential losses which may occur during air, sea or land transportation.

If you’re a mover obviously you’re exposed, there’s risk involved so you need to make sure to offset that risk and the best way to do it of course is with insurance. Commercial liability insurance is probably the first thing you should look into. If you are a mover and you own one or more trucks in addition to the auto liability insurance, you should also look into having cargo insurance and the last thing is workers compensation insurance, it may be required in some parts of the country. Lastly, you would not believe how many movers think that their liability insurance is covering the goods themselves, when in fact it doesn’t. So don’t take chances, do it right, make sure you’re disclosing everything to your client to avoid lawsuits and also make it easy for your customers to reach you whenever they need your assistance in any matter.