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

The core. The building at full replacement cost, contents and stock where you hold them, theft and glass. Liability is set to who you are: property owners liability at $20 million for a landlord, and public and products liability at the same benchmark for an operator. Welding sparks, forklifts and contamination are operator risks, not building risks.

Machinery breakdown is not in it. On the nine business pack wordings we place most often, property cover excludes a motor that burns out or a compressor that seizes from the inside. Breakdown is a separate section you have to take, and the breakdown sections inside a pack commonly exclude the switchboards and wiring that fail. On an industrial site that gap is expensive: a fault in the power run under the car park can mean ripping it up. That is often a standalone policy's job. See Equipment Breakdown Insurance.

Construction is a validity question, 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 question is not a higher premium. It is whether the policy responds at all.

In our experience, industrial sheds are the buildings that come back furthest short. Many were put up by the owner years ago, sometimes at mates rates, and are insured only for the part the owner thinks matters. What gets missed is the slab, because owners think concrete cannot be damaged. Then the kit price paid 20 years ago, labour at trade rates, the professional fees to get the building approved again, and today's building code. On older buildings, site clearance and asbestos removal, which is a specialised, regulated job. And debris removal: a metal shed has to be cut up to be taken away and recycled.

The sum insured has to be the full cost for third-party trades to put the whole building back, not what it would cost you with a mate helping on the earthmoving.

Independent measurement points the same way: industrial property is the most underinsured category, an average gap of 31 per cent against 24 per cent across property generally (MCG Quantity Surveyors). Specialised or imported plant adds to the rebuild figure too, through freight, currency, lead times and hired substitute equipment, and it can take over a year to re-source. That is why our business interruption guidance is 18 months by default, 24 where we can, and 12 only on your express instruction.

What a short figure does to a claim is in The Co-Insurance Clause: What Every Building Owner Must Know.

A real valuation: is a builder's estimate enough?

No, a builder's rough estimate is not enough to set a sum insured. A builder's rough estimate prices the cost to put a structure up, not the full cost to reinstate a whole site after a total loss, and the gap can be enormous. In a 2026 on-site building replacement valuation for a family-owned timber-processing business in regional Queensland, which CIB commissioned and paid for as a one-off, an independent quantity surveyor's assessment put the rebuild cost at roughly 2.8 times the builder's estimate the owners had been ready to insure to. The line-by-line anatomy of that gap is set out in full on our valuation page.

What we check: we commission a desktop building replacement valuation at no cost to you, for our purposes as your broker. The sum insured is then a measured rebuild figure, not a guess. See Desktop Building Replacement Valuation.

Who uses your building matters to your insurer every bit as much as what the building is for.

In a published determination, an owner had insured a building as restaurant premises. By the 2023 renewal, part of the building was being used by a religious organisation, and that was never mentioned. The insurer had changed what it was prepared to cover in May of that year, and on the true facts it would not have renewed the policy at all. So when a theft claim of $99,294.70 came in, it was reduced to nil in a determination published in October 2025, and the insurer was entitled to cancel the policy back to the renewal date and hand the premium back.

Nothing had burnt down. The use of the building was not the problem. It did not need to be deliberate. Section 21 of the Insurance Contracts Act does not ask whether you meant to. The owner simply had a policy describing a building that no longer matched the one they owned, and they found out at the worst possible moment.

That case was a restaurant, but the mechanism is identical on an industrial site, and industrial tenancies change faster than most. Storage becomes welding, welding becomes spray painting. Each is a different risk that the insurer either priced differently or would have refused.

What we check: at every renewal we ask who is in the building and what they actually do in it, and the reminder is written into our renewal email template.

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 who they are. Asbestos roofs are harder to place across all policy types.

A declined renewal is the start of a phone call, not the end of your options. On quoting generally, up to nine insurers write comparable business pack wordings on our platform, so a placement with us is a comparison. If you have been declined over panel or a roof, call us before renewing anything.

Anyone who owns, leases or runs a business from a factory, industrial shed, workshop, cold store or distribution centre. The activity inside matters more than the shape of the building, because the activity is what insurers underwrite. Recycling and waste, chemical storage, spray painting, and timber and plastics processing are harder to place, and exactly the risks we work on.

Every type of commercial building we insure is on our commercial property insurance page. If you are the landlord, start at For Commercial Property Owners; if you bought the shed your business runs from, For Business Owner-Occupiers; if you lease it, For Business Owner Tenants. If your business runs out of a warehouse and the stock inside is what you want insured, see Warehouse Insurance.

1. Not telling the insurer a tenant's activity changed.
2. Not declaring EPS content or an asbestos roof.
3. Assuming the building policy covers machinery breakdown.
4. Insuring only the part you think can be damaged. The slab, trade labour, fees, code upgrades and debris removal all belong in the figure.
5. Ignoring a large roof until hail forces the issue. Our Nearmap reviews, more than 1,200 roof condition checks a year, are built for industrial-scale roofs.