Point-Of-Sale Attraction: Homeowner's Insurance

"The major benefit is that the builder can take people from the purchase decision to mortgage, title and then all the way to homeowner's insurance in one seamless process," Balboa president Drew Gissinger says. "That takes a lot of the stress out of the transaction, especially for first-time buyers.

"For builders, we're offering a revenue stream that compounds year after year, with each policy renewal, and the opportunity to save money on the operations side with streamlined underwriting."

Left to their own devices, many first-time buyers overlook the necessity to secure homeowner's insurance before closing. That's what led Ryland to begin offering homeowner's insurance in 1995, according to Carol Graham, president of Ryland Insurance Services.

"Now we're able to offer buyers one-stop shopping for financial services as well as a home," she says. "We used to deal with 10 different insurers to cover all our markets. We've had a contract with Balboa since January that now covers the bulk of our homes coast to coast. Our capture rate is 52%, which means we should write policies on more than 7,500 homes this year."

Balboa's program for national builders carries the additional punch of being able to insure houses in high-risk markets (such as hurricane-prone South Florida) because the bulk of a national builder's production would offset the houses in high-risk areas.

"We can't pretend that somebody building 20 houses a year will get the same advantages as somebody building 20,000," Gissinger says. "We now have contracts with four of the top 15 builders. Our next step is to go to large, regional builders, and we're testing a product for builders of 200 to 400 houses a year.

For more information, check out Balboa's Web site at balboainsurance.com, or call Drew Gissinger at 949/222-8017.