Written by William Paull
Co-Founder & Account Director
On this page
- Direct insurer, comparison site, or broker: what is each one?
- What is a direct insurer not required to tell you?
- When does buying insurance direct actually make sense?
- Where does going direct go wrong?
- Is it cheaper to buy insurance through a broker?
- What does working with a broker actually look like?
- Common questions about brokers and direct insurers
Buy insurance direct and you are buying a product off a shelf. Nobody in that sale is required to work out whether it fits what you do, what you own, or what would sink you if it went wrong. Reading the fine print and finding the gaps becomes your job. A broker is there to take that job back off you.
Direct insurer, comparison site, or broker: what is each one?
A direct insurer is a shop counter: it sells you its own products, and whether you chose well is yours to discover later. A comparison site quotes a small panel and passes you to the insurer that actually carries the risk (the underwriter). A broker is a licensed adviser who works for you, searches the wider market, and is accountable for the cover they recommend.
Some "compare business insurance" brands place the cover through a single provider behind the scenes, so you are still choosing one product on your own, from a short list someone else drew up. It looks like choice, but it is still a product sale.
A large part of the Australian commercial insurance market does not sell to the public at all, so there is no direct way to buy it. According to APRA, the industry regulator, intermediaries such as brokers placed close to half of all general insurance premium written in Australia in the year to June 2025.
Some insurers are broker-only by design. The specialist insurer Blue Zebra tells customers outright that "you can only purchase our insurance using an insurance broker". IAG's own newsroom describes how Australia's largest general insurer splits its business in two: an intermediated division built around brokers and agents, holding its CGU and WFI brands, kept structurally separate from its direct-to-consumer brands. To see where you can buy commercial property cover, go to our commercial property insurance page.
What is a direct insurer not required to tell you?
In a direct sale, the insurer is generally giving general advice or no advice, so it is not required to consider your objectives, situation or needs, or to tell you a product does not fit. A broker giving personal advice takes your circumstances into account and owns that advice.
Australian financial services law has two kinds of advice. "General advice" is not tailored to you. "Personal advice" takes your own objectives, financial situation or needs into account. When a direct insurer gives general advice, the law requires only that it warn you the information does not consider your circumstances and that you should read the product disclosure statement and decide for yourself. That warning is the quiet line printed on every direct insurer's page: none of this was built for you.
On the broker's side, the Insurance Brokers Code of Practice commits subscribing brokers to act for you, and to tell you on the rare occasions we are acting for the insurer instead. None of this means a direct sale is unlawful or second-rate. General advice and no-advice product sales are legitimate, and plenty of people buy that way every day.
When does buying insurance direct actually make sense?
When the risk is simple, standard and has no structure behind it. A single family car, a basic home and contents policy, or a sole trader with no premises, no stock and no employees can often buy direct with little downside. The more moving parts, the more a broker earns their keep.
Even QBE, which sells through both brokers and directly, tells people that going direct can be a reasonable choice for standard motor, low to mid-value home and contents, and a business whose risks rarely change.
As a rule of thumb, direct is usually fine when three things are all true: the risk is a single, standard asset; there is no trust, company or SMSF sitting behind who owns it; and losing it would not end your livelihood. Break any one of those (more than one property, a business entity in the mix, or a loss you could not fund yourself) and the cost of getting it wrong stops being small.
Where does going direct go wrong?
It goes wrong when a simple-looking product meets a not-simple situation. Flood left unticked because nobody asked. The policy in a director's name when a trust owns the building. A sum insured that fails the underinsurance test. Business interruption never offered. Each one is invisible until a claim, when it is too late.
Flood as an unticked box. On a commercial policy, flood is usually a deliberate choice, not an automatic inclusion. A form does not stop to ask whether your address floods. If nobody ticked it, you are not covered. You can see what is and is not automatic on our commercial building page.
The wrong name on the policy. A direct form accepts whatever name you type into it. Cover for a building owned by a family trust, company or SMSF often ends up in the name of a director or tenant personally. At claim time, that mismatch can leave the true owner unprotected.
A sum insured that fails the underinsurance test. Many commercial policies test your sum insured against at least 80% of the true rebuild cost, and on a partial loss the payout can be scaled down in proportion to the shortfall. On a total loss there is no scaling, but you receive only the sum insured and carry every dollar of the gap yourself. Only about one in ten businesses think they are underinsured (Insurance Council of Australia, 2015; Vero, 2025), yet when valuers actually check, buildings come up around 24% short on average (MCG Quantity Surveyors). You will find the worked numbers and the published determinations in our co-insurance clause article. Why the gap keeps growing is in our underinsurance article.
Business interruption never offered. The cover that replaces your income while you rebuild is easy to skip on a direct form, and it is rarely explained. Most business pack policies we review have no business interruption cover at all, or a period too short to survive a rebuild. See what tenants need.
A claim is exactly the moment you want someone whose job is to argue your side.
Of the four, the sum insured is the easiest to take off the table. For commercial building clients, Consolidated Insurance Brokers commissions a desktop building replacement estimate at no cost to you, so the number on your policy is a rebuild figure for your building, not a guess. It is commissioned for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you. See how the desktop building replacement estimate works.
Is it cheaper to buy insurance through a broker?
Not always cheaper, and we do not sell on price. What a broker gives you is the whole market instead of one shelf. Take the same risk to several insurers and the quotes can land thousands of dollars apart. Whoever only ever sees a single quote has nothing to measure it against, so they never know whether their price is sharp or wildly high.
Our promise is fit-for-purpose insurance at a competitive rate. Most people do not want the cheapest policy or the dearest. They want cover that is fair and that fits.
Quotes for the same building differ because each insurer sizes up your risk differently, carries different costs behind the scenes, and wants your business more in some months than others. On the main platform we quote from, nine insurers write comparable business pack wordings, so we can put up to nine quotes side by side and add a further quote from outside that panel where it is competitive. To check whether your premium is fair for your risk, see our commercial property insurance page.
Commercial property premiums have come off their peak. Insurers are chasing the well-kept, low-claims buildings hardest. If your renewal lands at the same number two years running, that is not a sign of a stable market. It is a sign nobody re-tested it.
A broker is usually paid in two parts: a commission from the insurer that is already built into the premium, and a broker fee for the professional service itself. We disclose both, in dollars, on every invoice, to every client, and have since we opened in 2010, which as far as we know still makes us one of the few brokerages in Australia that does.
What does working with a broker actually look like?
You start with a conversation about what you actually stand to lose, not a form. The broker searches the market, checks the wording, and explains what you are covered for and what you are not. Every year the policy is taken back to market, checked and explained. Sometimes the honest answer is to stay put.
Once we know what you cannot afford to lose, we can find cover that protects it. Then we read the wording, so you hear about any condition that could bite before you pay, not from an assessor afterwards.
The renewal to be wary of is the silent one: a fresh invoice with a higher figure and not a single phone call to explain it. We take your cover back to the market before the notice reaches you and confirm it still fits the business you are running today. Then we ring you to walk through anything that changed and why. Some years the number goes up. You will always know the work was done.
Sometimes the straight answer is that your cover is already close to right, so our advice is to leave it where it is. We do not move you onto a new policy just to earn a fresh commission. The full case for using a broker is on why use an insurance broker.
Common questions about brokers and direct insurers
Do brokers cost more than buying direct?
Often a little more once the broker fee is counted. Consolidated Insurance Brokers shows every client exactly how much: the broker fee and the commission on the same invoice, in actual dollars, not a percentage. The commission is already built into the premium. The broker fee pays for the advice and the accountability that comes with it.
Can a broker get me insurers I cannot reach myself?
Often, yes. Many of Australia's commercial insurers and specialist providers do not sell to the public at all, and Consolidated Insurance Brokers reaches them for you. Some, like Blue Zebra, state plainly that you can only buy their cover through a broker. That matters most for anything the mainstream insurers find awkward: unusual construction, northern or high-risk locations, vacant property, or a trade the household names decline.
Is a comparison site the same as using a broker?
No. Consolidated Insurance Brokers searches the wider market and is accountable for recommending cover that fits your risk, while a comparison site quotes a small panel and often passes you to a single insurer behind the scenes. A comparison site's job ends when you click buy; the fit of the cover, and any gap in it, is still yours to catch.