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SAY goodbye to insuring your house for replacement. It was nice while it lasted.

In future, the risk of not getting full replacement value is going to be on you. You will have to work out what it will cost to rebuild your house.

There are all sorts of hidden extras such as resource consent, retaining walls and swimming pools, which can be easily overlooked. Add to this the volatility of the building industry.

Finally, when there’s a crisis such as in Christchurch, scarcity is going to make everything even more expensive.

Be very careful working out the cost of rebuilding. It’s likely to be higher than the market value of your house (excluding the value of your land). You could get a quantity surveyor’s help. Once he/she sets up the measurements, it should be easy to key in new monetary values in following years.

Once you have a cost of replacement, you then need to decide how much you want to add to this figure to allow for delays and price rises.