You don't have to run a single day of business from your building to be the one who gets sued over it.

Three edges belong to other products on this site; a fourth does not.

If you also run a business from the building, that business's own trading risk, a customer hurt while dealing with your business rather than with the building itself, sits on a separate public liability policy. See Public Liability Insurance.

If your building is on a strata or body corporate title, the body corporate's own strata policy covers its liability for the common property, not your liability as an individual lot owner. It always covers the common property, and usually the building as well, though not in every scheme. Where a scheme's lots sit in a standard format plan and the buildings are detached, the body corporate may have no compulsory building cover at all, so it is worth knowing which plan yours is on. See Commercial Strata Insurance.

And if you lease the building to a tenant, their public liability policy covers their business, not you, even where you're noted as an interested party on it.

The fourth edge cuts the other way. If you hold your own business pack policy for the letting or leasing side of what you do, your ownership liability can already sit inside that policy's liability section. On the business pack wordings we place, the definition of "business" in that section is written broadly enough to include the ownership of the premises, not just whatever trades from inside them, provided the schedule correctly describes that letting or ownership activity.

A standalone property owners liability policy earns its keep in three situations. You hold no business pack at all and are relying on someone else's policy; the schedule on the pack you do hold doesn't describe your ownership or letting activity; or you're a standalone owner with no wider business pack to fold it into. A cover review checks which of those is true for you.

Consolidated Insurance Brokers recommends $20 million as the benchmark property owners liability limit, the same benchmark we use across our commercial landlord and strata clients. It isn't a legal minimum for a standalone owner the way a comparable figure is for a Queensland body corporate; it's the level that matches what courts, financiers and most commercial leases now expect.

Two more points. Defending a claim costs money whether you're found liable or not. On the liability wordings we've read in detail, those legal costs are paid on top of your liability limit, not carved out of it, so a long, expensive defence doesn't eat into the amount left to settle the claim.

And it isn't cover for absolutely anything. On the wordings we place, it doesn't extend to a deliberate or reckless act, to injury or damage connected to a defect you already knew about and didn't disclose or fix, or to plain wear and tear and gradual deterioration left unaddressed. None of that is unusual; every liability policy works this way.

In Loose Fit Pty Limited v Marshbaum & Ors [2011] NSWCA 372, a gym patron fell down an internal staircase at a Mosman shopping centre that had never had a handrail fitted. The defect came from a renovation the building's owners had carried out before they ever leased the space to the gym. The injured woman sued only the gym, which paid her the $433,441.57 recorded in the 2011 judgment. The gym then went after the building's owners for a contribution, and the NSW Court of Appeal agreed: the owners had breached their own duty of care before the tenancy even started, and were ordered in 2011 to personally pay 50%, $216,720.79.

Strata and industrial building owners carry the same exposure in a different form. In SafeWork NSW v The Owners - Strata Plan No 93899 [2024] NSWDC 277, a damaged industrial gate on common property at a Berkeley, NSW strata complex was left in service after being clipped by a van. Eight days later it fell on a worker from a business operating on site who was trying to fix it, and killed him.

SafeWork prosecuted three separate parties, the strata managing agent, the business trading on site, and the owners corporation itself as the building's owner, which was separately convicted in 2024 and fined $225,000 plus costs. The business on site being fined didn't stop the owners corporation from being fined too, and no insurance policy pays a regulatory fine itself, only the legal costs of defending against one.

Vacancy doesn't lower this risk, it usually raises it. An empty unit or a half-vacant building still has a car park, a stairwell, a fence line, and nobody using it every day to notice when a step cracks or a light goes out. The exposure sits there, unmaintained and unwatched, until someone, a contractor, a real estate agent showing the space, a trespasser, is hurt by it.

Many owners only think about their liability exposure once, when they first buy the building, and never again. We treat it as a standing check, not a one-off box tick. Every time we review a commercial property owner's cover, we confirm three things. The property owners liability policy is in place. It is named to the exact entity that holds the title, whether trust, company or individual. And it sits at a limit that matches what a court would expect today, not what felt like enough a decade ago.

The gap is usually a misplaced assumption, not a missing policy. A lawyer acting for someone injured on the property will run a title search, identify the registered owner and serve them directly, regardless of what any other policy on the building says. We'd rather you heard that from us than from a solicitor's letter.

Not a cheaper number: a cover check that starts from who can be named in a claim, not from who you assumed already had it handled.

• Commercial landlords leasing a building to a business tenant. See Commercial Landlords Insurance and For Commercial Property Owners.
• Strata and body corporate lot owners, commercial or mixed-use. See Commercial Strata Insurance.
• Business owner-occupiers who run their own business from part of a building and lease out the rest, where the part you occupy sits on public liability and the part you lease out sits on this policy. See For Business Owner-Occupiers.
• Industrial building owners, including multi-tenant industrial and warehouse complexes, where common areas, driveways and shared plant carry the same owner-level exposure as any other commercial title. See Industrial Building Insurance.
• Owners of vacant or partly vacant commercial property.

Your liability is one part of an owner's cover; the building and the rent it earns, for each type of building, are on commercial property insurance.

Tenants trading from the premises need a different policy: see Public Liability Insurance and For Business Owner Tenants.

"My tenant has public liability insurance, so I'm covered." Their policy protects their business, not you. If their cover has lapsed, was never adequate or excludes the incident, the claim still lands on your desk as the owner. The FAQ below answers it in full under "Doesn't my tenant's insurance protect me as the landlord?"

"The body corporate's strata policy has this covered." It covers the body corporate's own liability for the common property, not yours as an individual lot owner. See the FAQ below, "Doesn't the strata insurance cover me as a lot owner?"

"The policy is in my own name, that's close enough." If a trust or a company owns the building, a policy in a director's personal name instead of the owning entity can leave the real title-holder unprotected when a claim names it. See who pays for building insurance on a commercial property for whose name belongs on the building policy.

"I sold the building, so I'm out of it." Not necessarily. A liability exposure can outlast the ownership or leasing arrangement that created it.

"My limit was fine when I bought the building." A limit set years ago rarely gets revisited until a claim, a lease, or a financier forces the question. Older policies were often written for $10 million, a figure that made sense when it was set but hasn't kept pace with what a serious injury claim can actually cost. Financiers, landlords' leases and body corporate by-laws increasingly expect more. If your policy still shows a figure well under the $20 million benchmark, check it before someone else does.