The goal of the Home Insurance Guide is to save consumers time and money by finding the best homeowners insurance company.

Obviously, you need to get a quote before getting a policy, but why get multiple quotes? Why not just pick the best ranked homeowners insurance company on the list? The answer lies in the complexity of how homeowners insurance companies price the insurance. Each homeowners insurance company has a proprietary way of quantifying risks. The result is that there is a lot of pricing variation in rates even among seemingly similar consumers in similar houses. Therefore, it’s important to get policy price estimates from a number of highly rated companies as one may be clearly better than the others.

Getting a quote can be a long and involved process, frequently taking about 15 minutes if an estimate is even provided on line. Fortunately, The Home Insurance Guide stream lines this process by recommending only carriers that provide online quotes at the top of the list. There are a few brokers, such as Young Alfred (assuming it’s available in your area), that do offer online quotes, but, for the most part, with brokers you’ll need to be called by an insurance agent before you can get a price quote.

We recommend getting two or three quotes from most highly ranked homeowners insurance companies on our rankings. Additionally, we recommend getting quotes from several fairly new and innovative homeowners insurance companies—Hippo, Lemonade and Kin—if they are available in your region. These companies have streamlined the quoting process by pulling information in from third party data sources, saving consumers a considerable amount of time. In some cases, providing a quote in as little as a minute. For that amount of (limited) investment, why not get another quote to consider.

In getting a quote, it’s important to determine the type of coverage levels that you would like, and be consistent in getting that same type of coverage across carriers. If you vary the types of coverage as you survey different carriers, you could be comparing apples and oranges in terms of coverage and costs. You would not want to dismiss a higher price homeowners insurance policy if it were a better value for the coverage provided.