Industrial Building Insurance. Not just what your building is worth. What it's built from, and what's happening inside it.

Quick answerThe core is the same as any commercial property placement: the building, contents and stock if you want them, theft, glass, and liability set to who you are, property owners liability for a landlord, public and products liability for an operator, at $20 million. What changes on industrial stock is what sits around the core: construction-type disclosure that decides validity, machinery that needs its own breakdown cover, and flood settings worth checking rather than assuming.

The core covers. The building at full replacement cost. Contents and stock where you hold them. Theft and glass. Liability by role: a landlord needs Property Owners Liability at $20 million; an operator needs public and products liability at the same benchmark, because welding sparks, forklifts and contamination are operator risks, not building risks.

The big industrial not-covered: machinery breakdown. Property cover pays for external events, fire, storm, impact, theft. It does not pay when a motor burns out or a compressor seizes from the inside, and on industrial premises the internal-failure exposure is expensive in ways offices never see. Think of the electrical run from the power company's pit, under the car park and into the building: a fault there can mean ripping up the car park at a cost of tens of thousands, and a large air conditioning plant can be a six-figure repair on its own. That is a standalone equipment breakdown policy's job, and business-pack machinery sections commonly exclude exactly the switchboards and wiring that fail. The mechanics live on Equipment Breakdown Insurance.

Construction disclosure is a validity issue, not a pricing one. EPS or sandwich panel content, the roof material and age, and the cladding must be declared accurately. Get them wrong and the problem is not a higher premium, it is whether the policy responds at all.

Flood and cyclone, reframed. Industrial wordings generally already include storm and flood as named perils, so the useful question is not "should I add flood cover" but "is my flood sub-limit and excess actually adequate", especially on industrial estates, which often sit on lower-lying land. And in Queensland, if your sum insured is under $5 million assessed across all locations on one policy, your cyclone premium may already be reduced through the federal Cyclone Reinsurance Pool: insurers subscribed to the pool apply the reduction automatically in their pricing, so it is not something you or anyone else needs to apply for.

One small real example of the liability core doing its job: a landlord client faced a $30,000 liability claim over their industrial premises, and their total out-of-pocket was the $500 excess. Unremarkable, which is the point. Cover set up correctly is boring at claim time.

Quick answerWe commission a registered valuer's desktop assessment for industrial buildings at no cost to you, we run aerial roof checks built for industrial-scale roofs, we pressure-test the occupancy description at every renewal so a tenant change never sits undisclosed, and we place EPS and asbestos-affected risk that mainstream insurers decline. We know who still says yes.

• The desktop valuation, industrial included. Commissioned at no cost to you, for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you, so the sum insured reflects a measured rebuild figure rather than the structure-only guess. See Desktop Building Replacement Valuation.
• The roof, at industrial scale. Large spans, skylights, rooftop plant, box gutters: more surface and more penetrations mean more ways for a storm claim to become a maintenance argument. Our Nearmap reviews, more than 1,200 roof condition checks a year, are built for exactly this. See Roof Condition Monitoring.
• The occupancy, pressure-tested every year. We always ask who the tenant is and what they do, and the reminder to check is written into our renewal email template in black and white, so a changed activity gets disclosed in weeks, not discovered at a claim.
• The hard-to-place placement. Most mainstream insurers decline a building once EPS sandwich panel passes about 20 per cent of floor area, some will consider more, and specialist markets exist beyond them for panel-heavy and asbestos-roofed buildings. We do not publish the who and the how, deliberately. What matters to you is that a declined renewal is the start of a phone call, not the end of your options. On quoting generally, up to nine insurers write the same business pack wording on our platform, so a placement with us is a comparison, not a single quote.

Quick answerThe industrial mistakes that decide claims: a tenant's changed activity nobody disclosed, EPS or asbestos content nobody declared, machinery assumed to be covered by the building policy, a rebuild priced as structure-only, a big roof ignored until hail forces the issue, and a flood sub-limit nobody checked.

1. Not disclosing a tenant's changed business activity. The warehouse tenant starts welding or spray painting, and the risk the insurer priced no longer exists. This is one of the biggest industrial traps, and the reason occupancy checking is built into our renewal process.
2. Not knowing or declaring EPS content or an asbestos roof. These are validity issues at placement. Asbestos roofs are harder to place across all policy types, and EPS past about 20 per cent of floor area is decline territory with most mainstream insurers. Declare it and place it properly, or discover it during a claim.
3. Assuming the building policy covers machinery breakdown. It does not; internal mechanical and electrical failure needs Equipment Breakdown Insurance, and on a production line or cold store that gap is the most expensive one on this list.
4. Pricing the rebuild as structure-only. Clearance, asbestos removal, code upgrades and machinery lead times are what push industrial rebuild costs past sums insured, and the measured industrial gap averages 31 per cent (MCG Quantity Surveyors).
5. Ignoring a large-span roof until hail forces the issue. More surface, more penetrations, more room for the wear-and-tear argument. A yearly aerial look is cheap; the argument is not.
6. Never checking the flood sub-limit and excess. Flood is usually already a named peril; the question is whether the settings match a building on low-lying industrial land.