Rising Property Damage in the Czech Republic: A Close Look

Every day, an average of 379 incidents occur in Czech households, resulting in property damage. Most frequently, the damage is water-related, such as burst pipes or flooding by neighbors. Thefts take the second place. The Czech Insurance Association calculated these findings based on their decennial data. According to them, nearly half of the damages were not insured.

According to rough estimates, households have about 35,000 water-related damages annually. Thefts follow with approximately 9,300 cases. Insurance events caused by storms, electronic damage, and overvoltage are further behind, with each having about 4,500 cases,” said Petr Jedlička, the association’s chief analyst.

The amount of damage in such events is gradually increasing. “Due to inflation and the expansion of household appliances, the average damage increased from 9,000 crowns in 2006 to more than 12,500 last year,” Jedlička said. This is an increase of almost two-fifths.

Over the past decade, people have suffered a total of 14.3 billion crowns in damages in more than 1.38 million household events. With nearly 658,000 uninsured damages, they lost 6.8 billion crowns, with each year seeing a loss in the range of 500 to 700 million crowns.

However, the number of uninsured households is decreasing. Last year, according to association data, there were 116,000 property damages in Czech households, but just under two-thirds of them were insured. People lost 550 million crowns in insurance benefits. 916 million crowns were paid out.

“The estimated number of uninsured households is decreasing over time, yet there are still 1.8 million uninsured,” said Lenka Slabejová from the Czech Insurance Association. Along with the decrease in uninsured households, the proportion of uninsured damages is also decreasing. While in 2006 it reached 57 percent of events that resulted in property damage, it was 37 percent last year.