I have my own questions regarding that
my attorney just finshed our new rent to own contract for me and we discussed this same thing. On one hand, holding the insurance and requiring the new tenant to have renters insurance seemed like a good idea. Upon discussing it further, we decided that our real goal was to treat the tenant as owner of the home and make that person responsible for all maintenance, insurance taxes etc, with our liability being only the carrying of the note.
We are not going to transfer title to the home until the end of the contract in order to be able to do a quicker FED instead of a longer repossession procedure
Since there was a local case where a mh burned and there were fatalities, resulting in the owner of the home being sued by the estate of the the tenant, we wanted to clearly establish that we were only carrying the note and creating a distance with the tenant and yet, the attorney still recommends holding the title in our name
we decided that as part of the “initial contract costs” the tenant would prepay out of pocket a years worth of insurance with a company that we found that would list us as additional insured so that if the policy was given a cancellation notice, we would have one as well and would have the opportunity to replace insurance,
Additionally we have a blanket policy that covers inventory and a new rider on our park policy that covers homes that we hold title to and are occupied in a rent to own situation
I still feel uncomfortable about the holding of the title and insurance issues as well. as it appears that the contract is trying to have the best of both worlds…treat the tenant as an owner who is responsible for everything…maintenance, insurance taxes etc, but then treat them as a renter when it comes to default