Mixed-Use Building Insurance: Shops Below, Units Above

Written by William Paull, Co-Founder & Account Director · 31 min read

What is mixed-use building insurance?

Quick answerA mixed-use building is one structure carrying more than one kind of use, most often shops or offices at street level with flats or units above. There is no mixed-use product. What covers the building depends on the title: one owner of the whole building insures the whole structure under a commercial property policy, while a lot in a strata scheme may or may not be the body corporate's to insure, depending on how the scheme was subdivided.

The short version

• Mixed-use is a description of the building, not a type of policy. Nobody sells a mixed-use product. The building gets sorted into a commercial policy or a strata policy first, and the mix of uses is then priced inside it.
• The first question is not what the building is used for. It is what the title says. One owner of the whole building, a lot in a strata scheme on a building format plan, and a lot in a strata scheme on a standard format plan are three different answers to "who insures the building", and only one of them is the owner.
• In Queensland, whether the body corporate must insure the building turns on how the scheme was subdivided. Most owners have never been told this and the assumption goes the wrong way more often than the right way.
• A home or residential landlord policy is written for a dwelling, and a shop at street level is not one. A business pack is written around what a business does at the premises, and flats above are an occupancy it has to be told about. Neither is wrong. They were each written for half of your building.
• The mix is a rating question as well as a cover question. What happens in the shop below decides how the flats above are looked at, and the shop with a commercial kitchen in it is the one that changes the conversation.
• One building means one rebuild figure, not two. A mixed-use building is rebuilt as a whole, and a sum insured worked out from what the shop is worth plus what the flats are worth is not a rebuild cost.
• If your tenants upstairs are residential, the common stair is yours. So is the rent while the building is out of action, and neither of those sits in a tenant's policy.

Most owners land here at one of five moments. A shop with a flat above has just been bought and the settlement statement is the first time anyone has thought about the insurance. A lot has been bought in a building with retail on the ground floor and the body corporate levy notice does not make it clear what is actually insured. A bank wants a certificate of currency before it will settle and the wording on it has to say the right thing. A home insurer's application had nowhere to describe the shop. Or a business insurer's had nowhere to describe the flats.

None of those five is a research problem. They are all the same problem wearing different clothes: the building is one thing and the insurance market sorts buildings into two boxes, so somebody has to decide which box this one goes in and what falls out of it on the way.

This page answers who has to insure the building, and where the cover falls short. It does not answer who ends up paying for it, because that is a lease question rather than a building question and it has its own home: who pays for building insurance on a commercial property covers the strata and mixed-use case there.

Who insures the building? Three shapes, three different answers

Quick answerThere are three ownership shapes a mixed-use building comes in, and the answer is different in each. One owner of the whole building on one title insures the whole structure themselves. In Queensland, a lot created under a building format plan or a volumetric format plan is generally the body corporate's to insure. A lot in a basic scheme created under a standard format plan, where the buildings are detached, is generally the lot owner's, because there the body corporate's building cover is not compulsory and taking part in any voluntary scheme is optional. Other states read against their own Act.

The word that decides it is on your title documents, not in your policy. Before anything else, find out which of these three you are.

Shape one: you own the whole building on one title

You bought the building. The shops or offices at street level are yours, the flats above are yours, the roof, the walls, the stairwell and the plumbing are all yours. There is no body corporate, no scheme, no levy and nobody else with a duty to insure anything.

This is the simplest shape to describe and the easiest one to get wrong, because there is no second party to catch the mistake. Nobody sends you a valuation every five years. Nobody raises a levy when the sum insured falls short. The whole structure is insured under one commercial property policy in your name, and every decision in it is yours alone.

Two things follow that owners in this shape are often surprised by. The first is that the residential half does not get insured separately just because the tenants upstairs are residential. It is one building, so it takes one building sum insured and one policy, with each tenancy listed on it. We do not split a mixed-use building across two building policies, and we have not found a case where splitting it was the better answer for the owner. The second is that the residential half is still your liability exposure: the stairs, the landing, the entry, the bin area and the car park are common parts of your building that residential tenants and their visitors use, and they are yours to look after whether or not anyone is paying rent to be there.

Shape two: you own a lot, and the scheme is on a building format plan

A building format plan is a scheme defined by the floors, walls and ceilings of a building. If your lot is a suite, a shop or an apartment stacked with others inside one structure, this is almost certainly the shape you are in, and it is what most multi-tenanted commercial buildings are. A commercial lot in a mixed-use tower is often subdivided a different way again, under a volumetric format plan, which is an air-space parcel rather than a set of walls.

In Queensland, where lots are created under a building format plan or under a volumetric format plan, the body corporate must insure each building in which a lot in the scheme is located, to the extent the building is scheme land, for full replacement value, reinstated to the condition it was in when new, with debris removal and professional fees included. Where the body corporate has a duty to insure a building, it must also obtain an independent full replacement value valuation at least every five years.

So in this shape the building is not yours to insure. What is still yours is everything inside your own lot boundary that belongs to you: your fit-out, your contents, plant that serves only your lot, your own liability and your rental income. That is a genuinely different conversation and it has its own home on our commercial strata insurance page, which sets out both layers and what the body corporate's policy leaves behind.

Shape three: you own a lot, and the scheme is on a standard format plan

A standard format plan is a scheme defined by the land, not by the walls of a building. Small commercial parks, industrial estates, some townhouse-style schemes and some converted sites are subdivided this way.

Here the Queensland rule flips, and this is the case almost nobody expects. Where the lots sit in a standard format plan in a basic scheme and there is a stand-alone building on one or more of them, meaning a building with no common wall with a building on another lot, there is no compulsory body corporate building cover at all. The body corporate may set up a voluntary insurance arrangement over those buildings for the owners of the lots they sit on, and taking part in it is optional. The statute says nothing about the lot owner's own duty either. It is simply silent, which means nobody else has to insure the building and in practice it falls to the owner.

There is one qualifier on that, and it is the part that catches a shop strip. Where the lots sit in a standard format plan and a building on one lot has a common wall with a building on the adjoining lot, the body corporate must insure each of those buildings for full replacement value. So the plain-words test is not just "which plan is the scheme on". It is "which plan is the scheme on, and are the buildings detached". That second case is the quiet one, so check which plan your scheme is on before you assume the building is covered.

⚠️ Either way, whichever plan format the scheme is on, a Queensland body corporate must hold public risk insurance over the common property and its own assets of at least $10 million for a single event. That floor does not depend on the plan format. It is the legal minimum rather than a recommendation: $20 million has become the commonly recommended benchmark, and it is what we recommend a committee holds. The wider explanation of why a building owner's liability limit matters is on property owners liability.

And in every scheme, of any plan format, the body corporate must insure the common property and its own assets. The word that is doing the work in this whole section is building. A scheme with no compulsory building cover still insures its common property.

How to find out which one you are in. The plan format is recorded on the survey plan for the scheme, and the body corporate's records will show it. In practice the fastest route is to ask the body corporate manager which plan format the scheme is on, and to ask for the current certificate of currency and the schedule behind it. If the scheme's policy covers the buildings, the scheme is insuring them. If it covers common property only, the buildings are somebody's and it is worth finding out whose before a loss decides it for you.

⚠️ This is the Queensland position. Strata law is made state by state and the split is not the same everywhere. In New South Wales, for example, the duty to insure the building sits with the owners corporation and does not turn on how the scheme was subdivided. If your building is in another state, the answer is read against that state's own Act. What is legally required of a commercial building owner, in each of the four places a requirement can come from, is set out in what insurance is required on a commercial building.

Why an ordinary home policy and an ordinary business policy each leave a gap

Quick answerA residential landlord or home policy is written for a dwelling, and a shop at street level is a use it was never priced for. A business pack is written around what a business does at the premises, and flats above are an occupancy the insurer has to be told about. Neither is defective. Each was written for one half of the building, which is why both halves are usually brought back together under one policy.

This is the part that sends most owners looking for an answer, and it usually arrives as a refusal rather than an explanation.

The residential side. A home and contents or residential landlord policy is built around a dwelling. Its wording, its perils, its excesses and its price all assume the building is lived in, and the questions it asks are dwelling questions. A shop at street level is a business being run inside the same structure, which is not what that policy was written or rated for. In our experience a residential insurer will not take a building that is designated commercial or that has a commercial tenancy in it at all. It is not a matter of the fit being poor and the price being high. The building goes on business insurance, and the residential part is then added to that. If your property is purely residential, residential landlord insurance is the right page. The moment part of the building is leased to a business, it is not.

There is still one job a residential landlord policy does in a mixed-use building, and it is worth knowing about. The building itself stays on the one commercial policy. Beside it, where an owner wants loss of rent or rent default on the flat, and cover for the contents the owner supplied inside it, a residential landlord policy can be written to carry those. That is the usual way around the gap rather than an exception to the one-policy rule, and it matters most where the flat is let short-stay, because the things in that flat are the owner's rather than a tenant's.

The commercial side. A business insurance pack is built around a business at a set of premises. Its centre of gravity is what the business does: the trade, the turnover, the stock, the machinery, the public who come in and out. Residential tenants living above that business are an occupancy the underwriter has to be told about, because people asleep upstairs change the fire and liability picture of the whole building whether or not they are anything to do with the business below.

What actually closes the gap. In shape one, a single commercial property policy over the whole structure, written with the mix declared, so that both uses sit inside one wording with one building sum insured. In shapes two and three, the strata policy takes the building where the body corporate has the duty, and the lot owner's own policy takes what is left inside the lot. Either way the fix is the same in kind: one policy that has been told the truth about the whole building, rather than two policies each told half of it.

⚠️ The non-disclosure trap runs the other way to how people expect. It is tempting, when an insurer will not quote, to describe the building as whichever half is easier to place. That is the single most expensive thing an owner can do with a mixed-use building, because it is the fact the assessor finds first. The building is described as what it is, both uses declared, and it is placed with a market that writes that. What an insurer is entitled to be told, and what happens at claim time when it was not, is covered in what insurance is required on a commercial building.

The residential tenants upstairs: three things that stay with the owner

Quick answerResidential tenants in a mixed-use building do not change who owns the building's risks. Three things stay with the owner in every shape: the parts of the building the tenants share, such as the stair, the landing and the entry; the rent that stops while the building is unusable; and the owner's own contents, which in a let flat means the things the owner supplied rather than the tenant's belongings.

The common stair is yours, and it is used by people who never signed a commercial lease. In a mixed-use building the residential tenants, their visitors, delivery drivers and tradespeople all use a stair, a landing, an entry, a bin area or a car park that belongs to the building rather than to any tenancy. Where a person is injured in one of those places, the claim comes to the building owner, and a commercial tenant's own liability policy is written to cover that tenant's occupation of their own premises rather than the owner's building. That is the property owners liability question, and its canonical home is property owners liability, which explains what limit to hold and why. In a strata scheme the body corporate holds its own public risk cover over the common property, which is the $10 million floor above.

The rent stops for the whole building, not just the damaged half. A fire in a ground-floor shop that makes the flats above uninhabitable takes out every rent line in the building at once, commercial and residential together. Loss of rent, and how long it is insured for, is one of the two questions a mixed-use owner most often has set wrongly, because the period is usually a number somebody typed once and nobody has looked at since. The rule of thumb we work to is that the period has to cover the rebuild and the re-letting after it, not just the rebuild. How that is set, and what a business interruption section is actually doing, is on business interruption insurance, and the landlord's cut of it is in the commercial landlord's insurance guide.

The contents question is smaller than owners think, and it catches them anyway. In a let residential flat, the tenant's belongings are the tenant's. What is the owner's is whatever the owner supplied: the appliances, the window coverings, the floor coverings in some wordings, and any furniture in a furnished let. It is not a large figure, and it is very commonly a figure of zero on a policy that covers a building with four furnished flats in it.

One building, one rebuild figure

Quick answerA mixed-use building is rebuilt as one structure, so it takes one sum insured covering the whole thing: demolition and debris removal, professional fees, rebuilding to the standards that apply today, and the time the rebuild takes. Adding what the shop is worth to what the flats are worth is a market value calculation, and market value is not rebuild cost.

Owners of mixed-use buildings arrive at the sum insured question by an unusual route, because the two halves of the building have different market values, different rents and often different histories, so it feels as though they should have different numbers. They should not. A fire does not stop at the ceiling of the shop. The building goes back up as one building, and not necessarily as the same mix of uses it had before: the floor that was flats can come back as offices. That is another reason the number is the cost of putting the structure back, rather than a valuation of the two uses that happened to be inside it.

What a genuine rebuild figure includes, and what it must not be built from, is set out in how to calculate your building sum insured. The short version for a mixed-use building is that the figure has to carry the whole structure, the demolition and removal of what is left, the professional fees to design and approve the rebuild, compliance with the building standards that apply now rather than when it went up, and the time the work takes.

And no insurer is checking it for you. In our experience an underwriter is not a valuer, and it is not their role to advise you on the number, so a building can sit on cover for years, renewing quietly, with a sum insured nobody on the insurer's side has ever tested. The number is yours and your broker's to get right.

What a shortfall costs, and it does two different kinds of damage. On a partial loss, which is the overwhelming majority of claims, most commercial wordings carry an average or co-insurance clause: the test is generally set at 80 per cent of the true value and some wordings set it at 85 per cent, so the figure in your own policy is the one that counts, and insuring below that figure means the insurer reduces the payment in proportion to the shortfall. On a total loss there is no clause to argue about. The insurer pays the full sum insured and the owner then finds out that the full sum insured does not rebuild the building. The arithmetic is in the co-insurance clause explained, and what the gap does to a commercial building owner in practice is in underinsurance in commercial buildings.

One thing changes the economics of getting this right. On several of the wordings we place, the co-insurance clause is switched off entirely where the sum insured is the full figure in a current professional valuation by an approved valuer. We commission a desktop building replacement valuation at no cost to you, so the figure is settled before the policy is written rather than after the loss.

In a strata scheme the same problem has a different bill attached to it, because a shortfall in the scheme's sum insured is raised as a special levy across every lot owner by lot entitlement. That mechanism is explained on commercial strata insurance.

What an insurer asks about a mixed-use building

Quick answerFour things decide how a mixed-use building is looked at: what the ground floor is actually used for, whether there is cooking in it, what hours it operates, and what the building is made of. The occupation at street level does most of the work, because it sets the fire and liability picture for everybody living above it.

An owner who has the answers to these four ready gets a faster and usually a better answer from the market, because where a file is thin an underwriter has to price for the worst version of what the building might be.

⚠️ One tenancy sitting empty is worth telling your broker about the day it happens, not at the next renewal. An unoccupied tenancy is a change to the risk the insurer priced, and most wordings deal with unoccupancy expressly.

The wider list of what moves the price of a commercial building anywhere in Australia is in what commercial building insurance costs, and it is not repeated here.

What goes wrong most often on a mixed-use building

This is not a list of things that could go wrong. It is what we actually see go wrong on these buildings.

The residential half never gets mentioned. Owners very often do not think to tell us there are flats in the building at all, and more and more of the time the residential part is short-stay accommodation rather than a long lease. It matters far more than it sounds. Not every insurer will write a building with a residential component in it, and several of the ones that will want the majority of the floor space to be commercial use before they will price it. So the detail the owner did not think worth mentioning is often the detail that decides which markets are open at all. And it does not stay a new-business problem. Where an insurer would not have offered cover had it been told, that is the answer the owner gets at claim time.

The tenant downstairs changes, nobody tells the insurer, and cooking is the one that hurts. A café with no deep fryer becomes a café with a benchtop fryer. To the owner nothing has changed, because it is the same café with the same lease. To the building's insurer the risk it priced no longer exists. In our experience that is the single change most worth a phone call the week it happens, and it is the one owners are least likely to think of as insurance news.

The renewal never prompts anyone, because the tenants are not on it. A good many renewal schedules do not list the tenancies at all, so the owner opens the mail, sees the same building and a familiar premium, and has nothing in front of them saying a change of tenant is theirs to report. Insurers have tidied a lot of this up over the past few years. The effect on the owner is the same either way: nothing on the page asks the question, so nobody rings, and the loss of rent figure and the building sum insured go another year without being looked at.

A rise that looks too small to bother with is the one that costs the most. It never once looks urgent. An owner sees building costs go up a little, decides it is not worth a call, and five years go very fast. The real movement is larger than the figure most owners carry in their heads: non-residential building construction costs across Australia rose 4.4 per cent in the year to June 2026, and about 40 per cent since 2018 (Australian Bureau of Statistics Producer Price Indexes, construction, released 31/07/2026). A sum insured that has not been looked at across a stretch like that is not slightly behind. It is behind enough to bite on a partial loss, where the co-insurance clause cuts the payment in proportion to the shortfall, and to leave the owner short on a total loss, where the full sum insured is paid and does not put the building back. Where an owner does not ring us, we generally lift the loss of rent figure by around four per cent a year ourselves, because landlords take a rent increase most years and the insured figure has to follow the rent rather than trail five years behind it.

A new lease gets signed before anybody asks what that tenant does to the premium. The trade at street level is one of the largest single drivers of what a mixed-use building costs to insure, and a cooking risk moves it by multiples rather than by a margin. Some trades are harder again, to the point where a building can fall out of the mainstream market altogether and have to be placed through a specialist agency at a price the owner never budgeted for. On a gross lease the owner absorbs every cent of that, and a meaningful slice of the new rent goes straight back out again as premium. It is one phone call before the lease is signed. It is the call we most wish owners would make, and the one they almost never do.

And nobody makes a freehold owner value their building. Where a body corporate has to insure a building, it also has to hold an independent full replacement value valuation, renewed at least every five years. An owner who holds the whole building on one title has no such duty from anyone at all, so the valuation is the thing that simply never gets done and the sum insured stays whatever it once was. That is the reason we commission the valuation ourselves rather than waiting to be asked for it.

What a claim looks like in a mixed-use building

This is an illustration, not a real claim, and not a promise about how any particular policy responds. It is here because the three ownership shapes above are abstract until something burns.

A takeaway shop on the ground floor has a fire in its kitchen after hours. The fire is put out, but the shop is gutted, the two flats above are smoke damaged and unusable, and the stairwell and the roof cavity are both damaged. Nobody is hurt. The building is closed for months.

In shape one, where you own the whole building. Your commercial property policy is the only building policy in the picture. It responds to the building damage across all three tenancies, and the rebuild figure it pays against is the one sum insured you set. Your loss of rent section carries the commercial rent and both residential rents while the building is out of action, for as long as the period you chose runs. The shop's own business insurance covers the shop's fit-out, stock and its own loss of income, not your building. If somebody is injured in the stairwell during the make-safe work, that is your liability, not your tenants'.

In shape two, where you own a lot and the scheme is on a building format plan. The body corporate's policy takes the building, including the stairwell and the roof cavity, and it takes them for the whole structure rather than lot by lot. Your own policy takes what is inside your lot that is yours, and your rent. If the scheme's sum insured is short, the shortfall is raised as a special levy across every lot owner by entitlement, including you, and including the lot owners who pushed for a valuation and were outvoted.

In shape three, where you own a lot and the scheme is on a standard format plan with detached buildings. There may be no scheme building policy at all. If nobody has told you that, the first person to say it out loud is the loss assessor.

The point of the three is not the detail. It is that the same fire produces three different answers, and which one you get was decided by a document signed before you bought the place.

And one that actually happened. A water pipe burst inside an internal wall of a mixed-use building. The escaping water went through all the flooring and flooded the ground-floor shop, a beauty salon. The claim came to about $110,000, and it was the tenant's claim on the salon's own business policy, which leaves the building damage and the rent on the owner's side of the same event. It happened in February 2020, and the business was not back in its own shop until November 2021, because the first repairs were not accepted and the argument about putting them right added month after month to the timeline. The damage was not the expensive part of that file. The tenant's business interruption cover was set too low and its indemnity period was only twelve months, so the back end of a twenty-one month displacement was uninsured and came out of a pocket rather than a policy. The lesson transfers straight to the owner, because loss of rent on a building policy is the same decision under another name: the period is a real decision and not a formality, and water inside a wall does not care which half of the building it is in.

FAQ

My building has shops below and flats above. Is that commercial or residential insurance?

Commercial, in almost every case, and the reason is that insurers sort buildings by what is happening in them rather than by how many of each use there are. In our experience a residential insurer will not take a building that is designated commercial or that has a commercial tenancy in it, so once any part of a building is leased to a business it goes on a commercial property wording that can carry both uses, with the mix declared. That does not mean the residential half is ignored. It means the residential half is priced and covered inside a policy that was built to carry more than one occupancy. If the building is a lot in a strata scheme, the question changes shape again and depends on the scheme, which is covered on commercial strata insurance.

Does my body corporate insure the building, or do I?

In Queensland it depends on how the scheme was subdivided, and the answer genuinely goes both ways. Where lots are created under a building format plan, which is a scheme defined by the floors, walls and ceilings of a building and is what most multi-tenanted buildings are, or under a volumetric format plan, the body corporate must insure the building for full replacement value. Where lots are created under a standard format plan in a basic scheme and the buildings are detached, meaning no common wall with a building on another lot, there is no compulsory body corporate building cover at all: the scheme may run a voluntary arrangement and taking part in it is optional, which leaves the building to the lot owner in practice. So check which plan your scheme is on, and whether the buildings are detached. Either way the scheme must insure the common property, and must hold public risk cover of at least $10 million for a single event.

I bought a house that has been converted into a shop with a flat behind it. What do I insure it as?

As one building with two uses, and the conversation starts with what the shop is used for rather than with what the building used to be. A converted house is still one structure with one roof, so it takes one building sum insured, and the rebuild figure has to reflect what it would cost to put back what is standing there now rather than what a house of that size costs. The thing most likely to change the answer is the trade in the shop and whether anybody cooks in it. If the shop and the flat were subdivided into separate lots when the conversion happened, then you are in a scheme and the plan format question above applies.

A bank wants a certificate of currency before settlement on a mixed-use building. What does it need to say?

Broadly, that the building is insured, for what amount, for what period, and that the lender's interest is noted. The detail is the lender's to state and it varies, which is why the certificate is worth reading against the loan conditions rather than assumed to match them. Two things go wrong on mixed-use buildings in particular: the sum insured on the certificate is the number the lender asked for rather than a rebuild figure, which satisfies the bank and not the claim, and the description of the property on the certificate does not mention both uses. What lenders, leases and bodies corporate can each require is set out in what insurance is required on a commercial building.

Does a commercial kitchen downstairs affect the flats upstairs?

Yes, and it is one of the questions that changes the answer for the whole building rather than for one tenancy. Commercial cooking, deep frying especially, is a fire exposure in a building where people are asleep above it, so the whole structure gets rated with that in mind rather than just the tenancy the fryer is in. What tends to make the difference is not the presence of the kitchen but what is in place around it: the extraction system, how often the ductwork is professionally cleaned, and what suppression is fitted. An owner who can answer those three is in a much better position than one who has to go and find out.

My tenants upstairs are residential. Does that mean I need landlord insurance as well?

Sometimes, and never as a second policy on the building. The building itself stays on the one commercial policy with the residential tenancies written inside it, because it is one structure and it takes one building sum insured. Beside that, where you want loss of rent or rent default on the flat, and cover for the contents you supplied inside it, a residential landlord policy can be written to carry those. In our experience that is the usual way around the gap rather than an exception to the one-policy rule, and it matters most where the flat is let short-stay, because the things in that flat are yours rather than a tenant's. What your own policy does is a question for the wording in front of you. Two things are worth checking in it: that the loss of rent figure includes the residential rents and not only the commercial ones, and that the owner's contents figure is not sitting at zero on a building with furnished flats in it.

Who is responsible if someone falls on the shared stairs?

The building owner, or in a strata scheme the body corporate for the common property, and this is the exposure mixed-use owners are most often underinsured for. A commercial tenant's public liability policy is written around that tenant's occupation of their own premises, so the shared stair, landing, entry, bin area and car park generally sit outside it. That leaves the claim with whoever owns the building. What limit is worth holding, and why the figure most owners have is a legacy number, is on property owners liability.

Do you insure purely residential strata as well, or only commercial and mixed-use?

We do both. Our strata work leads with commercial and mixed-use schemes, which is where most of our clients are and where the questions on this page come from, but a purely residential scheme is something we can and do place. If that is what you have, ring us on 07 3292 1111 and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit for it.

Related content

Product pages:

• Commercial strata insurance: the two layers in a scheme, and what the body corporate's policy leaves for the lot owner.
• Commercial building insurance: the cover itself, what it pays for and where it usually falls short.
• Commercial property insurance: the wider property view, including what sits inside the building.
• Commercial landlord insurance: written for owners who lease their building out.
• Residential landlord insurance: for a property that is purely residential.
• Property owners liability: the shared stair, the injured visitor, and what limit to test.
• Business interruption insurance: loss of rent, and how long it needs to run.

Who you are:

• Commercial building owners: if the whole building is yours.
• Commercial property owners: if this is one of several properties, and entities are in play.

Guides:

• Who pays for building insurance on a commercial property?: landlord, tenant, and what the lease actually decides, including in a strata or mixed-use building.
• What is in the insurance clause of a commercial lease?: what a real lease puts on each side.
• What insurance is required on a commercial building?: the law, the lender, the lease and the body corporate.
• How to calculate your building sum insured: what a genuine rebuild figure includes.
• The co-insurance clause explained: what an inaccurate sum insured costs at claim time.
• Underinsurance in commercial buildings: the gap, and how it opens.
• What commercial building insurance costs: the drivers behind the number.
• The commercial landlord's insurance guide: the landlord side, in full.
• Is commercial property insurance tax deductible?: including how a premium is split when you live above your own shop.
• Insurance terms glossary: plain definitions for the words on this page.

Tools:

• Desktop building replacement valuation: the rebuild figure, at no cost to you.
• Underinsurance risk checker: two minutes, and it has a mixed-use option.