When a resident moves into your facility, they’re entrusting you with a lot — including any personal possessions they bring along. In fact, if you own or manage a Residential Care Facility for the Elderly (RCFE), it’s important to help your residents think through protecting their personal property.
You need to partner with them in this because in some cases, your own insurance policies extend them a layer of protection. And if you don’t have coverage for their belongings, you want to ensure that they’re somehow protected. That way, if anything happens at your facility, you’re not left in a difficult situation in which your resident assumed coverage and had none.
Ultimately, you can do a lot to empower your residents to protect the possessions that are important to them. Here are three options for insuring their belongings that you can explore with them.
Option 1: Insure Belongings Through the Facility
Some RCFE commercial property insurance policies offer coverage for residents’ personal property. In fact, offering this bonus of choosing your facility can help you stand out from the competition.
Talk with your insurance agent to see if your current commercial property coverage extends protection to your residents. If it does, communicating that throughout your facility can foster goodwill while putting residents’ minds at ease.
If your policy doesn’t offer this feature and you’re interested in exploring one that does, our team can help you look into your coverage options.
Option 2: Their Family’s Homeowners Insurance
Many homeowners insurance policies protect personal belongings even when a family member is living elsewhere. Not only do these policies offer coverage for children who’ve recently moved away to go to college, for example, but they may also protect the belongings of the policyholder’s parents living in a care facility.
You can encourage residents to talk to their children about their own insurance coverage. Checking for this policy provision gives them a way to know if they already have the insurance they need for their personal possessions.
Option 3: Contents Insurance
If your RCFE can’t insure residents’ belongings and they don’t have an applicable home insurance policy to step in, they have a third option. It’s called contents insurance, and it’s specifically designed to protect personal property in the event of fire, theft, and more.
Since residents living at a facility don’t need a home or renters insurance policy, contents insurance gives them a way to buy only the protection they need. They can adjust the coverage limit on the policy to properly safeguard whatever they bring to your facility.
With these three options, you give your residents different paths they can explore to protect what’s precious to them.
If you want to be able to provide them with the first option, call our team at (805) 413-5668. We can help you find the right insurance products for your RCFE. Our team of RCFE coverage specialists are waiting to help you get the coverage you need to safeguard not just your facility but also what your residents bring to it.
