Allstate Review: Home Insurance Companies

You can't hear Allstate's company name without hearing the commercial in your head asking, "Are you in good hands?" The company was founded in 1931 as part of Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and became completely independent in 1995. Allstate is headquartered in Glenview, Illinois and has an annual revenue of over 57 billion dollars. In addition to home insurance, Allstate offers insurance for your car, motorcycle, rental property, and more.

Three basic steps

The main risks and perils that Allstate's insurance covers are theft, fire and smoke, windstorm or hail, falling objects, frozen plumbing, water damage from your water heater, plumbing, or heating/cooling systems (and more). Regardless of where you live, there are risks to your home that need to be covered by insurance. Allstate lays out a basic three step process to get covered through their company. First, you'll work together with an agent to design an insurance policy plan that fits your unique home. Then you'll apply for the policy, and lastly, get accepted for protection. You'll maintain contact with your agent to make sure your policy is up-to-date and covers any changes that may occur in or around your home.

Get a quote within minutes

From the top of Allstate's website, you can click "Get a quote" and select the type of insurance you need. You'll be asked to provide your zip code and basic information like your name, home address, and birthday. Through public records, the site will pull what it can find about your provided address (year built, square footage, residence type). You'll need to input when you purchased the property and select any protective devices your home has. You'll continue to answer specific questions about your property like what types of additions you may have done, if it has a pool, if you have a finished basement, if you have a fireplace, what type of foundation you have, and more. All of this information is used for the company to decide how much of a liability your home is and come up with a quote for you. It takes just a few minutes to fill out all the information.

Easily compare pricing

When you finish filling out all the information about your home, Allstate will show basic, standard, or enhanced choices for your insurance. Each option is priced differently and you can use their "compare options" tool to see the differences between them. The less expensive plans usually have a higher deductible and don't cover quite as much of things like your personal property, additional living expenses, and medical expenses if an event occurs. There are optional add-on coverages you can choose from that will change the overall monthly price such as identity theft expense, extended coverage on jewelry, watches, and furs, green improvements, and other optional things that may pertain to your lifestyle.

Finalize with an agent

Once you're satisfied with everything on your insurance plan, the coverage, and the monthly cost, you can checkout. They'll ask you for some more personal details and you'll provide your phone number so an agent can contact you. When you talk to the agent over the phone, this is when you'll find out for sure what your overall price will be (but unfortunately sometimes it changes slightly from what you see online), and you can get your insurance locked in. If you're not quite ready to checkout, you can save and email your quote to refer back to later. This way you don't have to fill out all the information twice.

Do everything online

In the event that you actually need to use your insurance (ironic how we pay for it but hope to never use it), you can file a claim directly from Allstate's website. You can also track your claims from there, review your billing and payments information, review your policy, view your ID cards, adjust your account settings, or contact a representative directly.

Terrible customer reviews

Allstate has an "A+" rating from the Better Business Bureau, which is actually quite surprising all things considered. When it comes to third-party reviewers about the company, things get dicey. It's hard to know reliably how a company like this performs since most people who deal with them beyond purchasing a policy are usually in some sort of an emergency situation. This means emotions are high and they're dealing with large sums of money, which is never a good combo. Overall, people report that Allstate has rude customer service and makes it difficult to put their policy into effect when they need it the most. People feel that Allstate is disloyal to its customers and don't follow through with the help they promise.

Big name, big problems

It's actually hard to find something good about Allstate online from customers who have dealt with them extensively. This is really concerning to us and makes us worried that the company has gotten so big and lost the heart of their service along the way. Because of their poor feedback from numerous customers, Allstate doesn't earn our recommendation for homeowners insurance.

On the Allstate website