Commercial insurance brokers for Bendigo and central Victoria
Put a Pall Mall building back and you are not only waiting on a builder. You are waiting on a settlement, an approval and a trade who is free, and the rent has stopped for all of it.
A Bendigo building can be rebuilt. What owners almost never price is how long the rent stops while that happens.
For owners, landlords and managers of commercial buildings, shopfronts and business premises across Bendigo and central Victoria. Trading from a building you do not own? Start at business owners who rent.
Who holds your file, and what they do with it
Our book has been spread across Australia since 2010, and very little of it is inside driving distance of a desk of ours. The offices are in New Farm, Brisbane, and in Bundaberg, and one named account manager holds your file, handles the renewal and the mid-term changes, and is the person you ring when something goes wrong.
On a let building the questions are the same wherever it stands. What the lease obliges each side to do, what the building would cost to put back, how long that would take, and what happens to the rent in between. Those are reading questions, answered by phone and email.
What we do not do is let the incumbent keep the policy by default. Every policy we hold goes back to the market at renewal rather than being rolled over, so the price you pay is one that has been tested this year.
How long would it take to put a Bendigo building back?
Quick answer
Longer than the insurance usually allows for. A commercial rebuild is not just construction: it is making the site safe, settling the claim, drawing and approving the work, and finding trades who are free. On an older city building with heritage constraints that sequence stretches further again, and the indemnity period is the number that decides who carries it.
In our experience, most of the business pack policies we review carry no business interruption cover at all, or a period nowhere near long enough to see a rebuild through. On a let building that shows up as loss of rent: the tenants leave, the income stops, and the outgoings do not.
We set the indemnity period at 18 months as our default and push for 24 where a client will have it, and we drop to 12 only when we are expressly told to. On a nineteenth-century building on Pall Mall or View Street the argument for 24 is not the construction at all. It is the approvals, and the wait for a trade who has done that kind of work before.
The premium difference between 12 and 18 months is usually far smaller than owners assume, which is why we extend it as part of the service rather than as an upsell. What we will not do is leave it at 12 without telling you what 12 means.
Vacancy, outgoings and the parts of a let building that get forgotten
Any let building has a between-tenants period, and commercial wordings treat an empty one differently from an occupied one. Many carry a condition that begins once premises have stood empty beyond a stated period, and what yours says about that is in your own policy.
It is not a trap if you tell somebody. A vacancy the insurer knows about is usually handled with a condition or an endorsement. A vacancy nobody mentioned is the one that gets raised after a break-in or a burst pipe.
Under all of it the building figure has to be real, so we commission a desktop valuation at no cost to you: a registered valuer's desktop assessment of the rebuild cost, commissioned for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you. Get that wrong and a partial loss is cut in proportion by the average clause, while a total loss pays the full sum insured and simply stops short of the building. On a let building each of those carries a second bill behind it, which is the rent not arriving while it is sorted out.
Short answers
Do you have a Bendigo office?
No. Consolidated Insurance Brokers looks after Bendigo and central Victorian clients from New Farm in Brisbane. On a let building, one named account manager reads the lease, sets the indemnity period long enough and hears about vacancies, renewal to renewal. We do have a representative based in Melbourne, though that is a person on the end of a phone rather than a shopfront. There is no Melbourne office. Our two addresses, New Farm and Bundaberg, are on our locations page.
Two of our shops are vacant. Does that change the insurance?
It can. When you tell Consolidated Insurance Brokers about a vacancy, we take it to the insurer now rather than waiting until renewal. Commercial property wordings commonly treat an unoccupied building differently from a tenanted one, and many carry a condition that begins once premises have stood empty beyond a stated period. An insurer that knows about a vacancy will usually deal with it by condition or endorsement. The difficult case is always the one nobody mentioned.
Our tenant pays the insurance as an outgoing. Whose policy is it?
Yours. The building policy belongs to the owner and stays in the owner's name, whatever the lease says about who reimburses the premium, and Consolidated Insurance Brokers makes recovering that premium straightforward. Recovering it through outgoings is a lease question rather than an insurance one. Where a building has several tenants, we prepare an individual premium invoice for each of them rather than handing you one bill to divide up.
Don't see your area?
We work with commercial clients in every state, by phone and video. Call 07 3292 1111.
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