renewing house insurance -- do I really need 'unlimited' buildings cover?

[ilovemydogandMrObama]

Am that I have mainly let house insurance automatically renew, but decided to shop around this year.

Massively lower online quotes, and when I called my insurer, they said I had, 'unlimited' house insurance. This means that if we had a fire and our house burned down and the rest of the block, it would rebuild all of them

Does this really happen?

I have sufficient cover for my house, not unlimited. There is a calculator on the abi website abi.bcis.co.uk/

I found Aviva were the cheapest and with Quidco I got £65 cash back too.

Mine's got unlimited house cover but it was still pretty cheap in comparison to my original insurer which was Direct Line. I think some just default to that.

Unlimited means that you don't need to worry about what the cost would be - not that they'd redo the block.
You do need to be sure that you have really covered the full rebuilding cost - this will be considerably more than your house value, especially if you are semidetached or in a terrace. Or indeed in a conservation area

I used to work in insurance (zzzz) Our line for explaining it was "Unlimited means in the event of a total loss your house will be rebuilt regardless of the cost"

No. You just need to know what the rebuild valuation of your house is and make sure that's covered. Unlimited buildings cover is a scam.

"this will be considerably more than your house value, especially if you are semidetached or in a terrace"

This is not true. My Grade I listed terrace is worth 50% more than its rebuild value.

Grade II, sorry!

Right, so went to the ABI website and even the cheapest quote on the web was double the amount suggested for a rebuild, so think that's reasonable?

We used NFU as our house/building is a bit hard to ensure and they were pretty well the only ones who could do it sensibly. They have turned out to be the cheapest for all our other insurance too. What's more, when we were trapped on holiday (aw shucks) when the volcano went off and we had to be there an extra week (again aw shucks), it turned out we had holiday insurance with them, and they paid the full amount which covered the extra hotel cost!