Hail Cover & Your Car Dealership
In light of the recent hail storms in the greater Sydney metropolitan area, it seems a pertinent time to discuss hail cover and points about the cover, pricing and its importance.
Hail cover for vehicle stock is typically the most expensive portion of the annual insurance premiums, depending on locality and claims history, I've seen upwards of 75% of the premium being hail protection expense. Hail cover is also the greatest impacted by positive or negative risk management processes.
So, what impacts hail premiums? To put it simply, if you want to reduce your hail premiums you can do several things such as, putting lower value vehicles in your outside lot space, quality and maintained hail netting, or a roof of some kind such as a pergola over your external lot. You may also look into a hail management plan, which may include the purchase of hail protective car covers that can be used on smaller amounts of vehicles or vehicles that are partially or fully exposed on part of your lot.
There are factors which will increase your premiums including, previous hail claims, high value, rare or high volume of vehicles in outside lot space, partial or no hail netting/roofing, climate related factors such as increasing severity and regularity of hail storms, or industry wide hail exposures that are not being managed correctly.
Where to start in managing Hail exposure? Speak to myself or my team at AJ Insurance Services. Due to our large dealership customer base, we have developed relationships with businesses that can complete hail netting and roofing installations to suit your needs. In a recent case study, we saw that a customer of ours will have fully paid off the cost of their hail netting installation within 5 years just in reduced hail insurance premiums. Not to mention the 'Hail Sales' that they would've likely had to do in that time to move damaged stock.