Any owner insuring property – including garages, sheds, outbuildings, gates and fences – must provide an estimate of the total cost to rebuild it from scratch. Often, people mistakenly put the current market value or the purchase price they paid, but getting this figure wrong can mean properties being over- or underinsured, which can have huge consequences, especially if there is insufficient money available in the event that a rebuild is required.

A rebuild cost calculator such as Gamma’s is handy for helping insurers and their clients to accurately work out the rebuild costs of their homes. Such a tool greatly speeds up the form-filling process: not only does it find properties from just the Eircode and use Autoaddress to autocomplete location details, but it also calculates rebuild costs based on the ECAD and Ordnance Survey building outline/size and mapping data. This ensures that properties are adequately insured, giving peace of mind to homeowners and insurers alike and producing instant quotations at the time of web or phone enquiry.

Although the rebuild cost has nothing to do with the land value, the original sale value or the current market value, it is linked to inflation and so will be affected by fluctuations in building costs, including labour and materials costs, and local property prices, which are linked to factors such as school catchment areas and housing supply and demand. Rebuild cost varies quite significantly across the Republic, with per square feet estimates ranging from €117 in Donegal to €182 in Dublin, but, usually, the final rebuild sum is less than the market value of the property today, i.e. the amount you’d expect to get if you were selling.