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By P & P Texas Insurance Group
The Fence, the Shed, and the Detached Garage Are Covered Too The hail comes through in April, you spend the afternoon walking the property, and the roof...
The hail comes through in April, you spend the afternoon walking the property, and the roof is the thing everybody talks about. But then you notice the wood privacy fence along the back of your Alamo Ranch lot took a beating too, and the detached garage where you keep the lawn equipment has dents in the door, and the little storage shed by the fence line lost a chunk of its roof. Good news: all three of those are usually covered under the same home policy that covers your house. Most folks just don't realize it, because nobody ever told them.
That coverage has a name. On a Texas home policy it's called other structures coverage, and it's built into a standard homeowners policy right alongside the coverage for the house itself.
Your home policy has a few separate buckets of coverage, and dwelling coverage is the big one, the part that pays to rebuild the house. But there's a second bucket sitting right next to it for the stuff on your property that isn't attached to the house. That's other structures.
We're talking about the detached garage, the storage shed, the workshop, the fence, the gazebo, a detached carport, a guest house or casita, even a permanently installed pool structure in a lot of cases. If it's on your land and it's not connected to the main house, it generally lives in this part of the policy.
The way it usually works: other structures coverage is set as a percentage of your dwelling coverage. A common setup is around 10 percent. So if your home is insured to rebuild at a certain dwelling amount, you'd have roughly 10 percent of that number available for everything else on the property, combined. That's not a rule carved in stone, and it varies by policy and carrier, but it's the general shape of how it's calculated.
Here's where it stops being a technicality. San Antonio gets hammered by hail. We've had over 80 hail events in the last five years, and one 2016 storm alone caused an estimated $3.7 billion in damage across the region. Hail doesn't politely limit itself to your roof. It dents the detached garage door, it shreds shingles on the shed, it splinters an older wood fence.
Wind does the same thing. When the remnants of a Gulf storm push inland and the gusts come up, fences are often the first thing to go down. A long stretch of privacy fence blown flat is not a cheap fix, and a lot of homeowners are surprised, standing in the yard the morning after, to learn it might be a claim rather than a weekend project they pay for out of pocket.
The bigger the property, the more this matters. Out in Helotes and Fair Oaks Ranch, where lots run larger and folks have real workshops, detached garages, and long fence lines, the "other structures" on a property can add up to serious value. Same with the older established homes in Shavano Park with mature detached buildings. If all of that is only covered at a default 10 percent, that number might not stretch as far as you'd think when a storm takes out more than one thing at once.
This is the part worth a real conversation. The percentage you have for other structures came from a formula when the policy was written, and it doesn't automatically know what you've built since.
Say you moved into a new build in Alamo Ranch a few years back with a modest yard and a simple fence. Then you added a detached garage, put in a nice shed, fenced the whole lot in cedar. Your property's "other structures" are now worth a good bit more than they were the day the policy started. The coverage percentage didn't change on its own. It's still sitting at whatever it was set to when you signed.
That's not a failure on anybody's part. It's just what happens as a property grows over time, and it's exactly the kind of thing that gets caught in a policy review. When we sit down with a homeowner and walk through what's actually on the property today, this is one of the first gaps we look for, because it's so common and so easy to fix before a storm rather than after.
A couple of honest limits. Other structures coverage responds to the same kinds of losses your main dwelling coverage does, things like hail, wind, and fire. It does not cover flooding. In Flash Flood Alley, that matters. If rising water damages a detached structure, that's a flood claim, and flood is a separate policy with a 30-day waiting period, which means you can't buy it when a storm's already in the forecast. The National Flood Insurance Program is worth understanding if you've got structures near a low spot on your lot.
There's also a common wrinkle: if a structure is used for business, a workshop you actually run a side business out of, for example, that can change how it's treated. Worth mentioning to your agent rather than assuming.
Before the next round of storms rolls through, it's worth knowing three numbers: your dwelling coverage, your other structures percentage, and a rough sense of what it would actually cost to replace the fence, shed, and detached garage on your property today. If that last number is bigger than the first two suggest you're covered for, that's the gap.
At P & P Texas Insurance Group here on the IH-10 side, this is a fifteen-minute conversation, and it's the kind of thing Anthony would rather walk through with you now than explain after a claim. Give the office a call at (210) 536-5990 and we'll look at what's actually standing on your property and make sure the policy knows about all of it, fence and shed and garage included.