Ask your insurer the boring questions.

What belongs with your insurer

A written quote for a shipping container names a unit and a delivery. It is not an insurance policy, a valuation, or a promise that a loss will be paid. Cover, a premium, and which events are included belong to the insurer who agrees them.

Do not assume household contents cover follows the sofa into the container, or that a business policy follows stock onto a site you only just leased. Ask. The awkward answer is useful before the goods move. The awkward answer after a loss is just awkward.

Tell them if the container is modified: a vent, an extra door, a lock box. A change can matter to them. Modifications are scoped in our quote. Whether that scope satisfies an insurer is a question for the insurer.

Tell them the grade words if they ask what they are buying into. Grades are condition descriptions, not an insurance class. An as-is unit is not sold as watertight. If your insurer assumes a watertight shell, do not hand them a different product and hope.

Events people forget to mention

Theft, storm, water at the site, and a vehicle hitting the corner are useful subjects to raise with your insurer, in their language, about your site. Asking the question does not mean those events are covered. Do not describe the container as proof against flood or fire, to them or to us. It is a steel box.

If the site is a workplace, a school, or a body corporate, ask who is responsible while the container sits there. Hire agreements and purchase invoices do not replace that conversation. Hire should say what you are expected to do on site. Your insurer should hear the same facts.

Transit is its own subject. A delivery arranged in the quote is not automatically a statement about who bears a loss on the road. Read the quote. If it is silent, ask before you accept, in writing. Reading the quote is the habit. Insurance is one of the silences to look for.

Keep photos of the empty container on arrival and of how you packed it. They help any later conversation, with us if something was not as described, and with an insurer if you have a loss. Photos are not a policy. They are evidence you will be glad to have.

A phone call before the sofa moves

A household buying a shipping container for a renovation rings their insurer before the sofa goes in. They ask three things: is the shell covered at the new site, are contents covered inside a container, and does it matter that they might hire instead of buy. They write down the answers in their own words. They do not ask us to confirm the insurer’s answers.

The insurer asks whether the container is within the boundary and whether anyone will sleep in it. The household says yes to the boundary and no to sleeping. If either answer had been different they would have stopped. A dwelling is not this product. They also mention a lock box is being quoted, and they describe it as a shield over the padlock, not as an alarm.

They ask us, separately, for grade words and for the delivery line to say what it says about the journey. They accept that our silence on insurance is correct, not rude. The quote is for the container. The policy is for the insurer.

When the container arrives they photograph the doors, the empty interior and the lock. They load on a dry afternoon, on pallets, because condensation is a packing problem and also a way to have a miserable insurance conversation about mould. Prevention is still their job.

Write down what they told you about the shell, the contents and the address. The useful part is the order: insurer first, quote second, load third. Reversing it is how a container full of goods becomes a discovery about a policy that never applied to the gate.

Write down what they said, in your words

After you speak to the insurer, write three lines in your own notes: whether the shell is covered at this address, whether the contents are covered inside a container, and whether hire versus purchase changes the answer. A shipping container quote will not repeat those lines, and it should not. If they asked about modifications, give them the modification description from the quote once it exists, not a vague earlier hope.

Transit is worth a separate question while the quote is still a draft. Ask us what the delivery line means, and ask them what their policy means, and do not assume the two sentences are the same sentence. Photos of the empty container on arrival are for that later clarity. Take them before you load. Take them in daylight, doors open, roof visible if you can do that safely from the ground.

If nobody will give you a clear answer, do not fill the silence by loading the goods you most care about. Clarity is the point of asking early. We will keep describing the unit and the journey. They will keep deciding cover. Those roles only work when you do not swap them.

Insurance questions

Their document, your address

Ask about shell, contents, hire or own, and the real gate. Insurance for a shipping container is that conversation. It is not a line we add to a delivery quote.

Locks are locks. What the quote itself must say is reading the quote. The sequence of an order is how ordering works.