Commercial Building Insurance in Brisbane

The converted house. Older timber houses used as professional offices, medical suites and allied health rooms are a Brisbane staple. They're the hardest of the four to put a rebuild figure on. A house with a tenant in it and a house stripped and rebuilt inside as a clinic are two different rebuilds. The classification chosen at quote time follows the building, not the tenant's trade. Get it wrong and your sum insured is wrong from day one.

Hard to value isn't hard to insure. In our experience the old Queenslander used as a professional services office is one of the easier commercial buildings to place, and it prices well. Timber mostly isn't the problem it sounds. An insurer is rating what happens inside, and a quiet, office-based professional tenant is a low hazard occupation.

The inner-city office floor. It's usually the best documented of the four. It's also usually the one whose sum insured has drifted furthest from construction cost, because nobody revisits it between renewals.

The industrial shed or warehouse. Plant and stock values grow quietly until the schedule no longer describes the risk. The building and its contents are separate covers, and both drift. See industrial building insurance and warehouse insurance.

The shop strip and the mixed-use building. With shops below and units above, commercial building cover meets commercial strata cover. This is where owners most often find that half of what they thought they insured sits in someone else's policy. Commercial strata insurance explains which half is which.

Before an underwriter looks at your building, they look at where it is. Where the file is thin, they price for the worst version of what the building might be. A broker's job is to make sure the file describes the building actually standing there.

We quote commercial buildings across a panel of nine insurers, and in our experience the nine look at different things. Some look at the roof, some at the wiring and switchboard and how old both are, and some want photographs before they'll price. There's no single checklist, so your building is worth putting to more than one.

Ruling out the Brisbane River rules out one of the four. Overland flow is water running across the ground to a drain or a creek. A building on a rise, three suburbs from the river, can still sit in an overland flow path.

Check whether your policy covers flood at all. On several of the wordings we place, flood is an optional extension that has to be switched on. On others it's built into the property damage cover. Your own schedule is the only reliable answer, and we'll read it with you on the phone.

A policy can cover flood on the building but not on the stock, plant or fitout. That gap doesn't show until you claim.

How we work out what flood means for your address

Two of our nine insurers include flood automatically and only take addresses with low flood risk. If they price your building, its flood exposure is low. If they won't, we generally test what flood costs with the rest of the panel.

Where the flood premium is small against the policy, we almost always recommend you take it. Where it's large, or the panel declines it outright, that's a conversation we have with you, not a line item you find later.

What changed in the Brisbane flood market after 2022

Insurers didn't change how they treat Brisbane commercial buildings in general, but flood changed sharply. Several repriced it heavily and stopped covering a great deal of it. Fewer now write it, and those still pricing certain Brisbane flood exposures are materially more expensive or decline the address.

We run more than 1,200 roof condition checks a year across our book, and you can read about them on our roof condition monitoring page. The causation test, and the Insurance Council's claim figures for the November event, are in roof leaks and insurance claims. If nobody has been on your roof since October 2025, ring 07 3292 1111 before the next storm season, not after it.

Neither overlay changes whether your building can be insured.

• It's checkable, and it isn't your homework. Council's City Plan online mapping tool shows which overlays apply to an address and produces a Property Lot Report. The Queensland Heritage Register is a separate state list with its own search. A building can be on one and not the other.
• Tell your broker either way. Heritage and character status is a material fact. If an overlay limits how the building can be reinstated and you haven't disclosed it, you've handed the insurer an argument at claim time.

No page can honestly print a price against a building type. The seven drivers that apply anywhere in Australia are in our guide to commercial building insurance cost.

No insurer is checking whether your sum insured is right. An underwriter isn't a valuer, and advising you on the number isn't their role. Getting it right is up to you and your broker. If it's wrong, the first person to say so is usually the loss assessor.

Non-residential building construction costs across Australia rose 4.4 per cent in the year to June 2026 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Producer Price Indexes, construction, released 31/07/2026), and that's the figure we work from on every building. For context, the same ABS series ran higher in Queensland over that year, at 8.7 per cent. Either way it measures what builders charge, not a Brisbane figure and not a quote on your building. A sum insured set three or four years ago and nudged up by a small percentage each year is the kind of number that ends up short.

A short sum insured does two kinds of damage. The overwhelming majority of claims are a partial loss. On those, the co-insurance test across the business pack wordings we place, as at August 2026, is generally 80 per cent of the true value and 85 per cent on some. Insure below it and your payment is cut in proportion. On a total loss, the insurer pays the full sum insured, which may not be enough to rebuild the building. The arithmetic is in our guides to the co-insurance clause and underinsurance. How to build a genuine rebuild figure is in our sum insured guide.

A Brisbane building, three months before the 2022 floods

This one is ours. A commercial building owner at Virginia, on Brisbane's north side, was one of the first clients through our desktop building replacement estimate programme. We had started it a few months earlier. The desktop building replacement estimate said the building needed a 40 per cent increase in its sum insured, which meant about a 25 per cent increase in premium. Debbie Blanco, the account manager on the file and the author of this page, put the recommendation to the owner and kept putting it. The owner agreed.

Three months later, the building was flooded in the February 2022 floods. It was a large partial loss, and the insurer paid about $745,000. The sum insured had already been brought up to a genuine rebuild figure, so the payment was not cut back. At the old figure, the same claim would have met the co-insurance clause.

That is one claim on one building and it is not a promise about yours. The window to fix the gap closes without warning.

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 estimate at no cost to you, so the figure is settled before a loss, not after it.

Start with the address. Then we'll ask for the current schedule, what the building is made of, what happens inside it, and the claims history. We commission a desktop building replacement estimate and price the building across a contestable panel. Then we tell you plainly what we found, including what's already fine in your current policy.

Today we insure commercial buildings in the inner city at Fortitude Valley, West End, Woolloongabba, Ascot, Clayfield and Annerley, and to the north and west at Ashgrove, The Gap, Stafford, Aspley, Chermside, Bracken Ridge and Sandgate. To the south and east we insure at Indooroopilly, Coorparoo, Carindale, Mount Gravatt, Sunnybank Hills and Calamvale, and Wynnum out on the bay. Just past the boundary in Redland City, which has its own council and its own mapping, we insure buildings at Capalaba, Alexandra Hills, Thornlands and Redland Bay. That's our book as at September 2026, not a list of where we'll travel. If your building is elsewhere in Brisbane, ring us anyway.

Not sure whether your Brisbane building is priced on what it would cost to rebuild, or on a number nobody has checked since settlement?

Your wording gets checked, not just the sum insured, and if something needs fixing you get real options rather than a single number, with nothing decided on the spot. There is no fee for the review.

The Brisbane team works from our New Farm office: address, map and parking.