The lighter side of insurance claims in 2025
Every year, our claims team sees the serious stuff that reminds you why house insurance and landlord insurance matter: storms, leaks, break ins, big events.
But in between the big moments, there is another side to the story. Tiny humans, runaway trampolines, drones with a death wish, and phones that seem determined to meet every body of water in New Zealand.
This is a light look at some of the more unusual patterns from our 2025 claims data, based on what we saw in the initio book.
House and contents
Tiny humans breaking things
Children do not show up in most claims, but when they do, the stories are very easy to picture.
Looking across our 2025 claims:
- Around 1 percent of all claims mention a child somewhere in the story
- For contents claims, that jumps to roughly 7 percent
- In some towns, around 3 in every 100 claims mention children in the description
On our books, you are most likely to find tiny humans breaking things in:
- Cambridge
- Nelson
- Gisborne
- Palmerston North
- Queenstown
What are they breaking?
- Screens and devices
- Glass doors and windows
- Soft furnishings and carpets
- The odd high value item that probably should not be within arm’s reach
Common themes in child related claims are:
- Accidental damage makes up more than 40 percent of the kid stories
- Followed by water damage from spills and overflows
- And glass breakage, usually with balls, scooters, toys or bikes hitting windows and doors
So while the bulk of our book is still storms, leaks and more traditional events, there is a clear pattern of small people and big repair bills.
Claim spotlight: the mobility scooter vs the glass door
One claim that deserves its own call out: a child driving a mobility scooter into a glass door.
It reads like a scene from a comedy, but it is a real claim with real broken glass and a real clean up.
It is a good reminder that accidents do not always look like the classic storm or burglary. Sometimes they look like kids having a bit too much fun practising to be the next big grand prix driver.
Runaway trampolines
If you own a trampoline, you probably already know it tries to rebrand into an aircraft in any kind of decent wind.
From our 2025 claims:
- Trampolines make up only a tiny slice of all claims, but
- They are roughly 3 percent of all wind and storm claims
Most storm claims are still for roofs, fences and leaks, but about one in thirty wind claims involves a trampoline trying to escape the backyard and live its best life out on the road.
A few of the real descriptions include:
- A trampoline that simply blew away and was never found
- A small tornado lifting a trampoline onto a roof
- Trampolines taking out fences on the way past
For home and contents insurance, it is a useful reminder that the risk in a storm is not just trees and roofing iron. It is anything light enough to take off, so tie things down before the next big blow.
Drones go rogue and fishing gear with a death wish
Ten years ago, it was rare to see drones or motorised kontikis in claims. Now they turn up often enough to be a pattern, even if they are still a small slice of the overall numbers.
A lot of the drones we see are used for fishing, taking lines out past the breakers, which is why they sit neatly alongside kontikis in our claims. Others are doing land based duty, filming the backyard or the farm, and getting into trouble there instead.
In 2025 we saw plenty of examples of drones and kontikis going AWOL, including:
- Drones hit by waves, sinking into the ocean or just lost at sea, never to be seen again
- Drones colliding with power lines or crashing on land
- Kontikis colliding with rocks or other solid objects and coming back broken
- Kontikis filling with water or just sinking and never making it back to shore
Put simply, some of the gadgets people use to fish seem very keen to join the fish.
These claims are still only a small fraction of what we see overall, but they are modern, very Kiwi, and show how quickly new tech turns into new kinds of risk.
New tech, new kinds of trouble
Phones, laptops, tablets and smart devices feature more and more in our claims.
Across our 2025 data:
- Roughly 1 in every 80 claims involves a mobile phone
- Around 1 in every couple of hundred claims involves a laptop
- Tablets and iPads sit a little behind that, but still show up as a clear group
- Robot helpers like robot lawn mowers and robot vacuums appear in a handful of cases
From an insurance point of view, it shows how much value is now sitting in small, fragile devices. For landlords, it is a reminder that tenants are bringing all this tech into your property too.
Landlord and rental property
The everyday chaos
When people think about rental property claims, they often imagine the big scary stuff: major meth damage, fires, floods, or tenants doing a runner.
Those things do happen. But a lot of landlord insurance claims are far more everyday. Think stained carpet, bumped garage doors, lost keys and a few over enthusiastic pets.
Looking across our landlord type claims for 2025 (where the description clearly involves tenants or rentals), most of what we see is surprisingly normal:
- Around four in ten landlord claims on our book are simple accidental damage
- Roughly a quarter are loss of rent only
- The rest is a mix of impact (things hitting the house), malicious tenant damage, and keys and locks
So most of the time, it is everyday life going wrong in small but expensive ways.
Why we care about this stuff
This is a playful look at our 2025 claims, but there is a serious purpose behind it.
Every time:
- A trampoline takes off in a storm
- A child drives a mobility scooter into a glass door
- A drone vanishes into the ocean
- Tenants backing into the garage door
- A phone or laptop ends up in water…
…it tells us something about how people actually live in their homes and rentals.
That feeds back into how we think about house insurance and landlord insurance. It helps us make sure common accidents are covered clearly, that our wording matches real life, and that we can give better tips on how to avoid some of these mishaps in the first place.
Behind every percentage and every claim code, there is usually a very human, very Kiwi story.
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