Commercial insurance brokers for Canberra and the ACT

Our clients have been spread across the country since 2010, and the ACT is no further from a phone than anywhere else. Our offices are in New Farm, Brisbane, and in Bundaberg, and one named account manager holds the file and answers for it.

Canberra commercial work is document work more than most. Leases, tenancy schedules, contracts with insurance requirements written into them, and certificates somebody needs before the quarter closes. Reading those and lining the policy up against them is the job, and it is done by phone and email.

That suits a market where the tenant is often a Commonwealth department and the questions arrive with clause numbers attached. An accurate answer is worth a great deal more than a reassuring one.

This is the gap we find most often on Canberra tenancies. A tenant fits out a floor to the specification the lease required, insures their contents and their computers, and never puts a figure against the fitout itself because it feels like part of the building. It is not, and the make-good obligation at the end of the lease is usually theirs as well.

From the landlord's side the mirror image happens: a building sum insured that was never adjusted for the base building services and finishes actually in place. Both sides are reading the same lease and reaching different conclusions from it.

So we read the lease and set the covers against it rather than assuming ownership decides. On a Canberra tenancy that usually settles three things in one sitting: what the landlord insures, what the tenant insures, and what happens to each side's obligations if the floor is unusable for six months.

A great deal of Canberra commercial activity happens under contract, and contracts specify insurance. Liability limits, currency of cover, sometimes a named interest, and a certificate of currency handed over before work starts or a lease is signed.

The other Canberra-specific point is the land. Commercial land in the ACT is held on Crown lease, and that does not change what a property policy is for, which is the building and your interest in it rather than the land underneath; your own schedule sets the detail. What it does affect is the permitted use written into the lease, and permitted use is one of the things an insurer rates and expects described accurately.

Fitout and liability are where Canberra attention goes, which is exactly why the building sum insured is the number that quietly goes stale. We commission a desktop building replacement estimate at no cost to you. It sets out what the building would cost to rebuild today, and it is commissioned for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you.

It matters because the two kinds of loss punish a low figure differently. On a partial loss the average clause cuts the payment in proportion to the shortfall. On a total loss the full sum insured is paid and nothing is deducted, and the shortfall turns up instead as the difference between that cheque and the rebuild. On a tenanted office building there is a third bill sitting behind both of them, which is the rent while the floor is unusable.