Consider this article a warning. East Coast Auto Insurance is the sister company of East Coast Health Insurance. I mention this because we started as an online health insurance broker first nationwide and only recently added auto insurance and still have quite a bit to learn. Quoting and selling health insurance online is a breeze compared to selling auto insurance online.
For instance, you can shoot over to our health insurance quote page right now, and in about 10 minutes have a health policy with any carrier you want. You can also do this here on our site for auto insurance. However, we are like the only ones with the goal of not just selling but brokering auto insurance nationwide. If you google the term auto insurance quotes right now, and ignore the carrier sites like Geico, Hartford, AARP, etc. you will not find one national auto broker besides us anywhere.
But if you google health insurance quotes you will find plenty of my competition. There are at least 20 or 30 national health insurance brokers that sell online.
So why is there no nationwide auto insurance broker online besides us? (We are not up in all 50 states yet either so please don’t give us too much credit but we are vehemently working on it.)
Part of the answer is because is there are probably only 100 health insurance carriers but possibly thousands of auto insurance companies. Not too mention that the industry is very fractured and there are quite a few companies that offer quote engines to put on your site where you can get credit for the sale but some of these auto quote engines are strong in one state and totally not available in others.
Auto insurance underwriting is based way to heavily on credit and driving factors whereas most people are able to get health insurance at the same rate.
But I think the biggest reason for the lack of national brokerages is that MVR (motor vehicle records) charges money every time you pull a record and unless you are Esurance or a big wallet insurance carrier you can’t afford to let agents run quotes on your site all day.
All in all though you can buy auto insurance on the internet instantly and East Coast Auto Insurance wants to be the first one to become a household name in auto insurance nationwide. Please help us by running an auto quote now!
By the way, Auto insurance brokers are for the most part insurance agents that can offer policies from several different auto insurance companies. A more popular term for an auto insurance broker is an independent car insurance agent. When an auto insurance agent works exclusively for one company they are called captive agents and are not likely to be able to help you shop around.