The world of specialty insurance: Renters, boats, recreational vehicles, and mobile homes

It's not unusual to buy specialty insurance to protect your valuable possessions. If you rent an apartment, you need renters insurance to cover your furniture, computers, electronics, clothes, and any other personal belongings. If you own a boat, a motorcycle, a recreational vehicle, or a mobile home, you need specialty insurance to protect them. Most standard homeowner insurance policies will not cover these exposures, or will limit coverage so much that you could have a significant loss (Akhtar et al., 2023; Kim et al., 2023; Nguyen et al., 2024).

Yet specialty insurance is very complicated. Often your excess and surplus lines agent has to put a policy together to exactly fit your needs, contacting several specialty companies or brokers, checking their quotes, and combining them. Insurance companies that specialize in these lines will only protect the risks they understand best. There is great expense in claims handling and restoring rented vehicles and vessels. And there is the risk of loss from theft and accident while traveling away from your home base, wherever that might be. Because of these peculiarities, the agents and companies that provide this specialty insurance have a trade association. The following descriptions of renters, boat, motorcycle, recreational vehicle, and mobile home insurance describe why you need to have a specialty line agent and not your general casualty and property agent to get the exact terms and limits you want (Thompson et al., 2024; O’Connell et al., 2025).