PROPERTY INSURANCE - Only 15.2% of homes in Greece are insured

According to the official figures of the Association of Insurance Companies of Greece, the percentage of homes that are insured for earthquakes (including fire), weather phenomena or both is limited to 15.2%. These are 969,584 residences out of a total of 6,371,901, which, based on the 2011 census, have been recorded throughout the country, revealing the great gap in property insurance that exists in Greece.

The highest percentage of insurance in relation to the total number of residences is, of course, in Attiki, where of the total of 2,118,743 residences recorded by ELSTAT, 455,752 have been insured, i.e. 21.5%. Next is the Peloponnese Region, where 38,819 of the 340,085 dwellings have been insured (15%), followed by the South Aegean with an insurance coverage rate of 13.3% (30,505 dwellings out of a total of 229,667) and Central Macedonia with a percentage of 13% (139,988 insured houses in total 1,074,242). In the rest of the regions of the country, lower percentages of insurance coverage are recorded, with the lowest being found in Western Macedonia (9.9%) and the Northern Aegean (9.4%), while in Thessaly 12.1% of homes are insured ( i.e. 48,049 out of a total of 395,842).

The majority of insured homes (63.2%) is due to lending, i.e. the obligation imposed by the bank in order for someone to obtain a mortgage housing loan to have insurance coverage. Thus, the insurance policies linked to a mortgaged property amount to 551,726, while the insurance policies not linked to a mortgage are 320,924. Indicatively, in Attica there are 231,207 insurance policies with building coverage that are linked to a mortgage loan and another 170,526 that are not linked to lending.

The practice that exists in the market is not uniform and so, depending on the bank, insurance may be mandatory only for earthquakes (fire is included as basic coverage) and in some cases also for weather phenomena, such as storm, storm, flood, hail, snow. According to the Union's data, 59.9% of insured homes, i.e. 580,949 homes, have insurance for earthquakes, weather phenomena or both together, while 31.8%, i.e. 308,074 homes and coverage, only have coverage for weather phenomena only for earthquake 8.3%, i.e. 80,561 houses.

Discount at ENFIA
It should be noted that in order to receive the 10% discount on ENFIA provided by the Ministry of Finance, one must have coverage for earthquake (fire included), but also other catastrophic phenomena, such as flood. Many borrowers who have a home loan do not know exactly what coverage they have purchased and so it is not a given that they will all receive the discount. For this reason, they should contact the bank and the insurance company, in order to upgrade their policy with the additional coverages in order to benefit from the discount.

Based on the data of the Union, 90% of the insurance policies have building and contents coverage (such as household goods) and only 10% have only the contents insured. Of the total number of insured homes, 47% are concentrated in the Region of Attica, while immediately after is the Region of Central Macedonia with 14.4% of insurance policies, followed by the rest of the country's regions, which have extremely low levels of insurance policies, which they range between 1.5% to 6.3%.