You insured the building. You didn't insure the fact that someone else is living in it.

Quick answerLandlord insurance adds three things a standard building policy does not carry: cover for damage a tenant causes, a payment to replace lost rent if an insured event makes the property unfit to live in, and a liability section that protects you personally if someone is injured at the property and you're named in the claim.

Tenant damage is where the fine print actually matters. Accidental damage, a hole punched through plasterboard by moving furniture, a burst pipe from a tenant's washing machine, is generally treated like any other insured event. Malicious damage, deliberate destruction by an angry tenant, is assessed far more narrowly on most policies in this market, and insurers genuinely dig into which specific items meet that test. A real 2021 determination published by the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) against a landlord insurance claim shows exactly how that plays out: of a long list of damaged items a landlord claimed as malicious, the insurer and AFCA found only some, a cracked toilet door and wall holes, actually met the "malicious acts" test; missing door knobs and fittings were covered under theft instead, cracked windows and a missing shower screen under accidental glass breakage, and items like carpet damage, blinds and general wear and tear were not covered at all.

On the wording we place, that narrow "was this malicious" test mostly doesn't stand between you and a claim for deliberate tenant damage to your own property in the first place. Cover attaches to accidental damage or loss, and only specific exclusions carve items back out: superficial scratching and scuffing, a tenant's general neglect or poor housekeeping, and theft, which stays a separate question, covered below. That's a genuinely different structure to the fact pattern the published case above had to work through, where a claim had to clear a defined "malicious acts" test item by item before it was paid.

What that means in plain terms: you don't have to prove malice, or file a police report, for the policy to respond. What matters is that the damage wasn't something you caused or intended yourself. A tenant who wrecks a room, or an occupant who damages the place in a way nobody meant to happen, is exactly the kind of loss this cover is built for, even when "vandalism" is the wrong word for it. We've seen that distinction decide claims in our clients' favour.

Theft is the one thing that still needs asking for. No landlord policy in this market, including the ones we place, automatically pays if a tenant walks off with your fixtures or fittings. It sits in its own optional section on every wording we've checked, and it's worth having, because on the wording we place it scales with what your buildings and contents are actually insured for rather than a flat dollar cap.

Loss of rent works only when the property becomes genuinely untenantable because of an insured event, fire, storm, that kind of thing. It is not rent-default cover, see the next section. On the wording we place, it runs for up to 24 months, well beyond the 12 months several direct products cap it at. And landlord liability is the section that responds if a tenant, or a visitor to the property, is hurt and comes after you as the owner, regardless of who was actually careless. That liability limit is whatever figure is shown on your schedule, not a fixed amount that comes bundled with the policy, so it's worth checking it's actually enough rather than assuming a number that sounds big enough is already there.

Where a broker actually earns their keep on a landlord policy isn't the day you buy it. It's the day a tenant has damaged a list of things and the insurer starts counting excesses.

Here's the part most owners never see coming. When a tenant damages several things, the insurer looks at whether it all happened in one event or built up over a period of neglect, and it can try to apply a separate excess to every separate piece of damage. Left alone, that turns one bad tenancy into a stack of excesses that quietly swallows most of your payout. We argue to bring that down on your behalf, to something commercial for the situation, so the cover you paid for has the best chance of actually reaching you.

It's the same reason we read the actual wording, not just the product name, before you sign anything: so we can see when the tenant-damage section on the policy you're being sold is written narrower than the one next to it, and tell you plainly which optional extras are worth the premium and which aren't, even though it costs us nothing to simply sell you all of them.

1. Assuming a tenant who stops paying rent is an insurance claim. It generally isn't, on a standard landlord policy (see the risk section above).
2. Assuming every dollar of tenant damage will be treated as "malicious." Insurers assess that word narrowly, and a real published dispute shows exactly how a long list of damage got split into what was covered and what wasn't.
3. Not telling your insurer when the property sits vacant between tenants, or when you switch it over to short-term or Airbnb-style letting. On the wording we place, cover lapses if nobody has lived at the property for a continuous 90 days, the same threshold CIB sees on the commercial side, though holiday letting is treated as its own category rather than simply "vacant." Going quiet about either change is the kind of thing that surfaces at claim time, not before.
4. Letting Queensland's smoke alarm law slide. Since 1 January 2022, every Queensland rental property has needed interconnected, photoelectric smoke alarms in every bedroom, in hallways connecting bedrooms, and on every level (Queensland Fire and Emergency Services; Residential Tenancies Authority, Queensland). It's a tenancy-law compliance obligation, not an insurance clause, but a fire that starts where an alarm should have been interconnected and wasn't is exactly the kind of thing that turns up in both a liability claim and a coroner's report.