Life Long Learning Leaves Brokers with an Opportunity

Brokers operating in the home insurance sector should be thinking about university this month. No, not going to university themselves but all those students who are heading off to higher learning. While their minds may be on the partying and the excitement of physics or history, there’s a gloomier side to university life that offers real opportunity for insurance.

University campuses are now a prime target for burglary. Not terribly surprising given that students now carry a huge array of portable technology to support their leisure and study activities. The average student will have a laptop or desktop computer, a reasonably high-end mobile phone and probably an MP3 player, a Kindle, and some form of games console as well.

Smart brokers will move to the top of the class, increasing this year's revenue as well as opening the door for future returns.

Mums and dads, seeing their little ones grow up, are always worried about the consequences of them flying the nest. Yet many have household insurance policies that offer little or no protection to their children’s possessions at university. While there are higher end policies which cover possessions in halls of residence and digs, many households have been ignoring these policies during the recession and settling for the basics.

This is a prime example of opportunity arising in existing client bases. Call your clients and ask them if their children are heading to university this year and if they have adequate insurance. You can use this chart to show the risks of burglary at any given university in the country. As you can see many campuses are particularly prone to theft from property. In the worst case scenario for some students a burglary may end their university career before it’s even properly begun.

There’s also the opportunity to sell tailored policies to the students themselves if household insurance cannot be extended to cover their risks.

This is not a question of exploiting students but rather offering education in one of life’s hardest lessons. Insurance is not an optional extra if you want to continue your studies with the minimum of interruption in the event of a burglary. Wise brokers will also be opening the doors to build up a lead database for future years when these students enter the workplace and join the country’s top earners.

You could even develop a list, rather like this one, as part of your marketing, that helps students protect their possessions and minimize chances of a claim being made. After all, you don’t have to do all your learning from books supplied with your course, do you?

Leave a Reply