Insurance is now a transaction deadline. Here is how to keep it from becoming a cancellation.
California purchase agreements carry a stand-alone insurance contingency, and the homes most likely to blow through it are the ones nobody flagged early. These guides cover what the paperwork requires, what to look at before you list, and where the line sits between helping your client and doing an insurance professional's job.
- Insurance is its own contingency now, and it is the one nobody starts on time.The 2024 forms revision pulled insurability out of the investigation contingency and gave it its own line, its own clock, and its own cancellation right. Most of the trouble that follows comes from three misunderstandings about how that clock actually runs.
- The insurance problem shows up in escrow. It starts before you list.Almost everything an underwriter reacts to on a California house is knowable before the sign goes in the yard. The seller's timeline is what you are protecting. A coverage problem discovered on day fourteen of escrow is a renegotiation you enter from behind, or a cancellation and a relist with days on market attached.
- Most insurance problems on a California house are visible from the driveway.Underwriting a California home runs in two passes: where it sits, then what it is made of. Almost everything in the second pass is something you can see, photograph, and write down on a preview, weeks before anyone is on a deadline.
- Insurance belongs on day one of escrow, not day fourteen.Two separate clocks run on the same problem, they fail in different ways, and almost nobody starts either one early. Here is what has to happen, in what order, and what an agent can put in motion at acceptance.
- You can help your client with insurance. Here is where the line is.This is not a page about staying out of trouble. Most of the useful work in an insurance problem is scheduling, documents, and deadlines, and all of it is yours. What is not yours is the judgement, and the reason to leave it alone has more to do with your client's claim than with your license.