How do you protect your hard-working construction tools and equipment against mischief, mayhem, and misfortune? With specialized insurance coverage designed to do just that.
Tools and equipment insurance for contractors is designed to help you protect your business should anything happen to the tools and equipment you depend on.
How Does Tools and Equipment Coverage Work?
Commercial property insurance typically covers a commercial building and physical property kept at a particular location. But tools and equipment coverage, also known as inland marine insurance, is designed a little differently...
Tools and equipment coverage goes where ever your property goes.
Tools and equipment coverage is there for contractors that are regularly on the move, taking their tools and equipment with them to work at different locations.
Offering protection against financial losses when tools or equipment are lost, stolen, or vandalized, inland marine covers:
Property in transit
Items that are being transported/ shipped
Mobile property
Tools and equipment transported from job site to job site
Property that stays in a moveable location
Such as a shaved ice truck with kitchen equipment inside.
What does this mean for your construction business?
Whatever tools you need to take with you into the field, from a cordless drill to a skid-steer loader, you’ll want to be sure that you’re covering it with inland marine insurance.
How Does Tools and Equipment Insurance Benefit Contractors?
In the construction industry, you take your ‘workshop’ with you from job site to job site, putting your hard-working assets at greater risk of getting lost, damaged, or stolen then if they remained in one location.
In the high-risk industry of construction, tools and equipment coverage helps protect you from one of the biggest risk of financial loss that your business faces: the risk of stolen or damaged tools and equipment.
Stolen Equipment
In a situation where the risk for thieves is low and the reward is high, the most common cause for loss of heavy equipment is theft. The reason for this is that heavy equipment is not only hard to track but it is easy to sell. With arrests and convictions rarely occurring, and penalties being light when they do, criminals see unguarded heavy equipment left on job sites as fruit ripe for the picking.
According to the 2016 Equipment Theft Report by the National Equipment Register (NER), annual estimates of the costs of equipment theft vary from about $300 million to $1 billion.
Construction equipment is most likely to be stolen when on a work site. These “other’s premises” typically have lower levels of physical security than “insured’s premises.”
Equipment value and mobility are the two factors that determine which equipment thieves are most likely to steal, which is why backhoes and skid steer loaders frequently go missing from construction sites.
Stolen Tools
Tools that are transported in vehicles are at high-risk of being stolen, smash-and-grab style. Whether they are smaller hand tools or more expensive, like a precision dual grade laser, the costs of stolen tools can add up.
Misplaced Tools
The tools that aren’t necessarily at high risk of theft are certainly always at risk of being misplaced in the moveable workplace of construction. Whether you lose something yourself or one of your employees can’t find a tool with your name etched on it, the costs can add up quickly when you are forced to replace tools that have gone by the wayside.
Damaged Tools and Equipment
Consider, also, the costs for replacing tools and equipment that are damaged either in the course of business during the day or by vandals in the night.
Work Accidents
If your skill saw is balanced on sawhorses and an employee trips on one, knocking it out of place and bringing your expensive tool crashing to the ground, you’ll have to replace it immediately to keep the project moving forward.
Vandalism
Imagine rolling up to your job site as the sun is rising to find that the chain link fence has been cut in the night by vandals. In one real-life example of construction site vandalism, vandals put glue on truck door handles, glued keys in a backhoe ignition, cut the seat of a backhoe, and filled a gas tank with water. Do you want to pay for that nonsense?
With tools and equipment coverage, you won’t have to reach into your own pocket every time that your tools are lost or damaged or head to the bank every time that your equipment is vandalized or goes missing.
Let tools and equipment insurance help you foot the bill so that you can keep your projects moving forward, and keep money coming in rather than paying it out.
