The cover you hope never to use
Renovation insurance (裝修保險) is the quiet line in a project that most people skip past, until a pipe leaks into the flat below and a small job becomes a large dispute. In dense Hong Kong buildings, where one waterproofing failure can reach a neighbour and the building’s common areas, cover isn’t optional peace of mind; it’s the difference between an accident and a liability you carry personally. Two policies do the work.
Third-party liability, the water policy
Third-party liability responds to injury or property damage to others. In Hong Kong the textbook claim is water: a waterproofing failure or a burst pipe seeping into the unit below. It also covers damage to the building’s common areas, lifts, corridors, lobbies, during the works. For a flat renovation, this is the cover you least want to be without, because the party downstairs is only ever one slab away.
Contractor all-risk, the works policy
Contractor all-risk (CAR) covers the renovation itself, materials, fittings and completed work, against fire, flooding or accidental on-site damage. Picture a near-finished kitchen damaged the week before handover: CAR is what stands behind it. It matters most on larger or longer projects, where there’s more value on site and more time for something to go wrong.
Who should hold it
The firm carrying out the works should generally hold the site cover, because they control the work and the workers. A simple, revealing test: ask to see the policy. A contractor who produces it without fuss is handing you a due-diligence signal; one who can’t, or won’t, is telling you something too.
Three things to confirm before work begins:
- What it covers.
- What it excludes, check the type of work you’re doing isn’t on the exclusion list.
- The period it runs, and that it spans the whole programme, including any overrun, so it doesn’t lapse halfway through.
Your home insurance is not a substitute
It’s tempting to assume an existing home policy has you covered. It usually doesn’t, home insurance is not interchangeable with site cover, and some home policies actively limit or pause cover while major works are under way. The safe move is two-sided: confirm the contractor’s site cover in writing, and separately review your own home policy, so there’s no gap where each assumes the other is responsible.
How Primeworks handles this
Employees’ compensation and third-party liability cover is a standard line in our preliminaries, not an optional extra you have to remember to ask for, and we’re happy to show the policy in writing before work begins. Where a project’s scale warrants contractor all-risk, we’ll advise on it as part of scoping. The point is simple: the party downstairs, and your own flat mid-works, should never depend on a handshake.