Two houses side by side on the same street can now attract wildly different insurance bills, and new data suggests the same house can too, depending on which company you ask. The average gap between the cheapest and dearest quote for identical house cover has reached $1,401, according to the latest quarterly index from insurance comparison site Quashed, a spread that turns the annual chore of renewing a policy into one of the easier ways for households to claw back money.
The figure comes from data Quashed shared with interest.co.nz, drawn from quotes run across the site for the June quarter. It is not a comparison of different homes or different levels of cover. It is the difference between the lowest and highest price offered for the same property and the same policy. On house insurance that difference averaged $1,401. On contents cover it was $599, and on comprehensive car insurance it was $651.
Quashed lets people upload their existing policy documents and compare cover across 13 insurers, and says more than 100,000 New Zealanders have used it. Founder Justin Lim says the widening gaps are a direct result of insurers becoming choosier about the business they want on their books. He told interest.co.nz the numbers reflect the “impact of certain insurers pricing in a way where they’re saying ‘hey, there’s certain business we want to write and certain business that’s not really part of what we want to do’.” His broader point for households is blunt. Paying more does not buy you more, and if you are not shopping around you are almost certainly leaving money on the table.
The reason the same house can be priced so differently comes down to risk-based pricing, an approach that has quietly reshaped the market over the past few years. Instead of pooling everyone in a region and charging a broad average, insurers increasingly price each individual property on its own exposure to flooding, earthquakes, landslips and storm surge. A home a few streets back from a river, or on firmer ground, can be waved through cheaply, while a near neighbour closer to the water is loaded up. Different companies weigh those risks differently and hold different appetites for them, so the same address can be cheap to one insurer and expensive to the next.
Tower and AIG were among the first to move fully to this model back in 2018, and the practice has since spread. For anyone whose premium has jumped without a single claim, this is usually the reason. It also explains why loyalty is no longer rewarded the way many older customers assume. Staying put can mean quietly absorbing every annual increase your insurer decides to apply, while a rival that reads your risk more favourably sits a four-figure sum cheaper.
The headline premium numbers offer some relief against that backdrop. Quashed put the average house insurance premium for the June quarter at $2,949, down 3 percent on a year earlier when it sat at $3,055. Comprehensive car insurance ran the other way, up 6 percent to $1,311 from $1,236. Contents cover was broadly flat at $860, and a general insurance basket across the categories came in at $5,120, down 1 percent on the $5,154 of a year ago. After several brutal years of rising premiums, a small easing in house cover will be welcome, even if it barely dents the increases that came before it.
There is a catch buried in the fine print, and it is the excess. Quashed found the average excess across all categories rose 15 percent over the year, and on house insurance it jumped 19 percent, from $974 to $1,160. A lower premium that comes with a much higher excess is not always the bargain it looks like, because it shifts more of the cost of any future claim back onto the homeowner. It is the kind of trade-off that is easy to miss when you are comparing headline prices alone, and it is one reason a cheaper quote deserves a proper read rather than a reflexive tick.
For households squeezed by the cost of living, the practical message is a simple one. Insurance is now one of the few big recurring bills where the market itself has handed you a lever, and pulling it costs nothing but an afternoon. A $1,401 spread on house cover is not a rounding error. It is more than a fortnight of groceries for many families, sitting there for the taking if you are prepared to get a few quotes and read what each one actually covers. The insurers have made pricing more individual than ever. The flipside is that the reward for checking has never been larger.
What has your experience been with insurance renewals this year, and have you found a better deal by switching? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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