OTTO Homeowners Insurance Review
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When it comes to insurance companies, there are a lot to choose from. That was certainly the case when my wife and I were first buying our condo and needed to find an insurer. While we were certainly tempted to use the same company that provided our renters’ insurance policy and auto insurance, other insurance carriers were much cheaper. We had a decision to make, and comparing insurance quotes from different websites was a real drag.
I wish we’d known about tools like OTTO Home back then. It's a web-based platform that makes it easy to quickly compare various insurance coverage options in your area. With a simple search, you can explore options for renters, home, and auto insurance.
Is OTTO Home a good fit for you? Here’s what you need to know about the platform and how it might help you in your quest to evaluate home and car insurance companies.
In this article
What is OTTO Home?
OTTO Home is an online website and tool that makes it simple to compare insurance coverage. Rather than go from insurance website to insurance website, you can use their lead generation site to quickly see which insurance partners might be a good fit for you.
The Otto website was created in 2015 and has a large network of insurance providers in its partner network. They are based in Miami, Florida, although the website is accessible anywhere in the United States. They share the following mission on their website:
“Our vision for OTTO Insurance is to represent the best consumer experience possible. Insurance is something you have to have, not something you choose to have — but we want to make that better. We’re not an insurance company. Think of us as a concierge service for insurance. The consumer is first, above all else.”
Using Otto, you may be paired with an insurance policy from a leading provider such as Nationwide, American Family Insurance, Farmers Insurance, Progressive, AAA Insurance, eSurance, or Liberty Mutual Insurance — among others. While Otto primarily focuses on cheap car insurance, it may also connect you with home insurance providers when insurance discounts are bundled with other products like auto or life insurance.
Compare rates from a network of lenders
- Low fixed mortgage rates
- Check and monitor your credit for free
- Only a few steps to your best mortgage rates
- Great deals on your mortgage
How does OTTO Home work?
Thanks to their bare-bones website design, getting a quote with OTTO Home is easy. You’ll start by heading to OttoInsurance.com, where you can input your zip code or speak with an expert on the phone. Handily, your zip code is roughly approximated based on your location, so you may not even need to type it in!
Once you’ve input your zip code, you’ll be asked if you currently rent or own your home. Otto Home tells you that if you own your home, you may be able to save as much as 20% on your policy. From there, you’ll be matched with options and able to click on “View My Quote.”
One nice thing about Otto is that if you want to speak to a live individual at any point during the process, you can always call their 1-800 number to speak to an expert insurance agent.
How much does OTTO Home cost?
Otto Home is free of charge to its users; however, you pay a small price. When you use their free service, your information will be collected and used to pair you with some of their hundreds of insurance providers. This makes sense because you need to be appropriately matched with potential insurance companies. However, this is your data being effectively “sold” to other companies.
This is what OTTO has to say about data collection and privacy on their website:
“If you submit a request on the Site for quotes for insurance products or services, we will share the personal information contained in your request form (such as your full name, address, telephone number, email, information about your cars, etc.) with third parties, which include insurance agents, insurance carriers, lead aggregators, and other insurance service providers (“Service Providers”) in our network to process and fulfill your request for quotes for insurance products and services.”
OTTO Home features
No frills website
Otto’s website is short and to the point. Rather than dealing with a variety of web pages, forms, or pop-ups, its homepage puts you right where you want to be: beginning a form to compare insurance coverage.
Fast comparisons from one website
Filling out the form took me less than a minute, and I was up and getting comparison quotes from different insurance companies. This is a much faster tool to use than most insurance companies' independent quote estimators, many of which can take much longer or include lengthy questionnaires. With Otto, it’s one-and-done.
Lots of great insurance partners
When it comes to matching you with insurance agencies, Otto has a large partner network of over 100 insurance companies. These include familiar household names like Nationwide, Esurance, AAA, Farmers, Mercury, Liberty Mutual, Progressive, and American Family.
Compare rates from a network of lenders
- Low fixed mortgage rates
- Check and monitor your credit for free
- Only a few steps to your best mortgage rates
- Great deals on your mortgage
Who is OTTO Home best for?
Otto is a great tool if you’re strapped for time or just get annoyed having to fill out the same forms again and again. Especially if you’re looking for specific features with your car insurance like roadside assistance or safe driver discounts, Otto makes it much more straightforward to compare car insurance quotes online.
Who shouldn’t use OTTO Home?
If you hate telemarketers or loads of emails and phone calls, you may need to be wary of Otto. Once you fill out their form, your personal contact information will be shared with a variety of insurance agents and companies on the insurance marketplace. While this makes sense from a match-making perspective, it does have the unintended consequence of an influx of calls and pitches.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Just fill out one form. When you need to compare insurance premiums quickly, filling out one form through Otto is much easier than filling out multiple forms across different websites.
- Great partner network.Using insurance marketplaces and comparison tools like Otto Home doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice the quality of your coverage. When you need free quotes for home, car, or life insurance, Otto connects you to leading companies like Progressive, Nationwide, and more.
- Free. A powerful tool like Otto Home could easily cost you money, but thankfully Otto is offered free-of-charge to all users.
Cons
- Shares your personal data. If you’re private about who has your contact information and what they do with it, you may want to steer clear of using a platform like Otto Home.
- Can’t choose which companies you compare. While Otto Home has a broad network of insurance companies to match you with, you unfortunately don’t have any control over which insurance agencies are or aren’t a part of that search. This means that if you’re looking to exclude a previous insurer because of a negative experience with them, they may still wind up popping up in your search results.
- Some negative reviews. On the Better Business Bureau’s website, Otto isn’t BBB accredited. Even so, they have a B- ranking and six complaints closed in last three years. TrustPilot, another website for customer reviews, also has a middling customer satisfaction rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars. Most of these negative reviews are about getting contacted by other insurance companies after filling out a form, even as many other reviewers claim that they were able to lower their rates.
FAQs
Is Otto Home a scam?
Otto Home is not a scam and does offer legitimate business services. Even so, there are a fair amount of negative reviews online about Otto when it comes to how personal information is used by the company. This is something to certainly keep in mind as you evaluate the pros and cons of using the tool.
Is OTTO Home available in all 50 states?
Yes. Your zip code is used to ensure that any of the companies you’re matched with are where you live — and you can use the tool in any of the 50 states.
Does OTTO Home share your information with other companies?
Yes. In order to pair you with specific insurance companies and policies, you need to fill out a form with Otto. As part of the process, you’ll share your email address and phone number in order to receive quotes on insurance premiums. This means that your data will be shared out as part of the match-making process. Otto posts this on their website regarding how personal data is used:
“If you submit a request on the Site for quotes for insurance products or services, we will share the personal information contained in your request form (such as your full name, address, telephone number, email, information about your cars, etc.) with third parties, which include insurance agents, insurance carriers, lead aggregators, and other insurance service providers (“Service Providers”) in our network to process and fulfill your request for quotes for insurance products and services.”
Compare rates from a network of lenders
- Low fixed mortgage rates
- Check and monitor your credit for free
- Only a few steps to your best mortgage rates
- Great deals on your mortgage
The bottom line
Otto is a great tool if you need to save time and money as you’re looking at various insurance companies. It is a streamlined option with a bare-bones website, but it works. Perhaps best of all, it quickly connects you with a wide network of insurance companies (over 100!), including familiar, popular insurers such as Progressive, Farmers Insurance, and American Family Insurance. All of this is provided free of charge.
One thing to note is that one of the reasons Otto can offer their services for free is that it uses your personal data to connect you to insurers, which means they may reach out after you fill out Otto’s form. There are complaints on both TrustPilot and the Better Business Bureau’s website from users who have been bombarded by calls or emails following filling out the form. Even so, plenty of satisfied customers have used the service, too.
Ultimately, it’s likely a personal call whether you think your personal data is worth handing over for the ability to compare insurers and rates quickly in just a few minutes.
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Writer
Brent Ervin-Eickhoff is a Chicago-based writer, stage director, and filmmaker with a background in digital marketing and content creation. In addition to Joy Wallet, Brent has written for Complex, Volkswagen, HowlRound, Picture this Post, and Third Coast Review, among others. He currently serves as the Associate Director of Marketing for Content Creation at Court Theatre at the University of Chicago. Brent graduated from Ball State University with Academic Honors in Writing.
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