Talk:Knob and tube wiring

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[edit] Increasing difficulty obtaining new HOI policies for K&T

John,

I am buying a home in NJ and it has 50% knob and tube wiring. It took me 3 weeks to find an insurance company to insure the wiring. The cost is $1800 for 6 months of coverage. The cost for replacing is 8,500. I close in December and it will be replaced in January-February. My policy will go down to $600 for a year. I agree with the others, coverage is impossible or unaffordable.

As my edit summary said a few weeks ago, availability of new HOI policies for homes with K&T that are being bought and sold is only sliding downhill. When I was calling around trying to find someone to write a policy, one guy hinted that I was basically ahead of the curve and that this was going to become a bigger problem in coming years. This will get solved on a case-by-case basis, as evidenced by your solution described above, but I think it is going to cause big headaches with surprises right before closing for a lot of people who thought everything was all lined up on their approaching settlement and then bam, K&T → no HOI → no mortgage approval → no sale. Sellers are going to be mad about being asked to take an unexpected hit on sales price right before closing as the buyers scramble to handle the last-minute-surprise costs (in your case, $8500 for rewiring plus the higher HOI premium). That's life, and lo que será, será, but it's a shame that this information will often have to be learned the hard way near settlement time. — ¾-10 01:02, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
I hear what you're saying, but I think this might be a regional difference. My best guess is that in areas where home prices are much higher than the rest of the country -- such as east and west coast -- insurance companies are (understandably) more stringent. I have had to move three times in the last five years, including last month. I just moved into a house with knob and tube and did not encounter any problems with getting insurance. In any event, both your experience and my experience are purely anecdotal and original research and do not fit wiki guidelines for inclusion in wiki articles. I agree that something should be mentioned and I think the current edit fairly covers the issue. --John Ivans (talk) 17:34, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
I agree completely. I am OK with the current version also. There's evidently a lot of variability between cases, so we can't really say anything more than what is said there. Seems pretty useless to add a sentence such as "Anecdotally, the hassle involved in lining up coverage varies from great to none." So OK as-is. — ¾-10 23:07, 28 November 2007 (UTC)