You’ve probably used them many times in the past to get auto, home, and life insurance quotes. Quote generator websites have been around in many different forms since the start of the Internet to help you get lower prices on many different kinds of insurance.
While there are many variations to the way these sites work, here is the basic process they follow for homeowners insurance. You enter information about your home including its location, size, age, roof type, construction materials, and other features along with your contact information. That information is sent by these websites to insurance companies who review your information and decide whether they would like to quote a price to insure your home.
All of the interested companies provide their quote information either directly to the website you originally visited or they might contact you either directly or through one of their agents. Depending on the quote generator website you used, you may receive an email containing a detailed quote, phone calls from insurance agents, or perhaps both.
In states other than Florida where there are hundreds of companies competing for your home insurance business, these quote generator websites can work well. They do the legwork for you and you end up with a lot of cost effective options to choose from.
Getting quotes for Florida home insurance presents a totally different situation when it comes to using these websites.
To begin with, unlike in other states, Florida has a lot fewer companies to choose from since only about 40 home insurance companies are writing new business. In addition, you should know that these Florida home insurance companies pay the quote generator websites for each lead that is provided to them. In reality what is happening is that the Florida insurance companies are paying the quote generator websites for the higher search engine rankings their sites have in order to reach more customers.
If you decide to use a Florida home insurance quote generator website, you will have to consider one or more of the following issues when using them.
First, some Florida homeowners insurance companies won’t partner with the quote generator websites at all. They sell Florida home insurance direct or through an agent network and don’t want to pay the additional fee to a quote website for the cost of the lead.
In addition, there are a large number of quote generator websites out there for each company to use to buy customer leads from. They will be limited to selecting only a handful of the quote generator websites that they feel will bring the most traffic and customer leads to them. More importantly, this means that none of these companies can afford to be featured on all of the quote generator websites. If you pick the wrong quote generator website, you might miss out on 10 to 15 companies in your Florida County that want to cover your home.
In each of the two situations described above, you’ll run a high risk of missing out on multiple homeowners insurance companies in Florida who want to cover your home or you’ll find that you are receiving the exact same quotes from the same few companies over and over again. No matter what, Florida home insurance will cost you more.
Missing out on even one company that is interested in covering you home is not a risk that you should take during the Florida home insurance crisis. Each new Florida home insurance quote that you obtain could save you thousands depending on where you live.
Finally, if you are planning on using a quote generator website to get Florida home insurance quotes, you have to consider the privacy of your personal information. While most of these websites protect your personal information, using some of them will result in you receiving a high volume of unwanted emails and phone calls from Florida insurance agents with a quote from the exact same company.
Given the situation with Florida home insurance, you have a much higher chance of finding lower cost insurance if you contact multiple independent agents that represent a large number of companies to cover your home instead of using the quote generator websites. Working with at least two large independent agents who can offer you the largest number of Florida home insurance agents is essential. Since each agent may represent a different group of companies, contacting more than one agent is your best chance to get a Florida home insurance quote from all the companies writing new business in your local market.
The more Florida home insurance quotes you get, the more you will save during the Florida home insurance crisis.
Read more here: Why Florida Home Insurance Quote Generator Websites Can Cost You More