Commercial insurance brokers for Geelong
An old manufacturing floor in Geelong now holds storage, a trade workshop or an agency fitout. The building stayed where it was. The insurance on it usually describes what used to happen inside.
Geelong buildings have changed jobs faster than the policies on them. Most schedules here still describe the tenant who left.
For owners and occupiers of commercial buildings, factories, workshops and business premises across Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula. Occupying somebody else's building? Business owners who rent starts in the right place.
How we look after Geelong clients
Our clients have been spread across Australia since 2010, and very few of them are local to us. Our offices are in New Farm, Brisbane, and in Bundaberg, and one named account manager holds your file, approaches the market at each renewal, and reads the wording rather than skimming it.
Geelong has spent the last decade turning industrial and commercial floor space over to something else. Alcoa closed in 2014 and Ford stopped building cars here in 2016, and what filled the gap was not one thing: storage and light assembly in some of it, trades in others, and a large public-agency and services sector taking up office space across the city. The buildings stayed. What happens inside them did not.
Working out what a policy now needs is reading and phone calls, and it is the same work whether the building is at North Geelong or out on the Bellarine.
What happens when a Geelong building changes use but the policy does not?
Quick answerThe policy keeps describing a business that has gone. Rating follows the trade and occupancy recorded on the schedule, so a building now used for storage, food production or a workshop is being priced as whatever it used to be. That is a pricing problem in the good years and a disclosure problem in the year something actually happens.
A building does not have to be altered for its risk to change. A new tenant brings different processes, different stock, different hours and a different fire load into the same four walls, and a schedule does not update itself when a lease turns over. Nor does the liability side of it: a floor that used to hold machinery and now holds customers, students or a production line is a different question about who could get hurt on it.
The obligation runs both ways and it is easier than people fear. You tell your broker what has changed, we put it to the insurer, and the policy is either endorsed or repriced. What causes trouble is the run of years where nobody asks and nobody says.
It can also cut in your favour. A building described while the presses were still running is being rated for a process that left with them, and that is worth putting right for the same reason as everything else here: the price should reflect the building as it is.
Replacing a building nobody would build that way today
A lot of Geelong industrial stock was built for a scale of manufacturing that has moved on: long clear spans, heavy floors, high bays, structure specified for loads nothing in the building now goes near. Replacing it means today's materials, today's trades and today's building requirements, which is rarely what the sum insured was based on.
So we commission a desktop valuation at no cost to you, a registered valuer's desktop assessment of what your building would cost to rebuild today, commissioned for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you. On the commercial-building business pack policies we place we will not write cover below 60% of that figure, and that is a floor rather than full protection: these wordings test the sum insured against at least 80 per cent of the building's value.
Being short bites in two different shapes. Damage one bay and it is a partial loss, reduced by the average clause in proportion to the shortfall. Lose the lot and it is a total loss: the full sum insured is paid, nothing is taken off it, and you find out then whether it puts a building of that size back up.
Insuring in Geelong: the common questions
Do you have a Geelong office?
We use an old factory building differently from the last tenant. What has to be told to the insurer?
The building is far bigger than our business needs. Are we paying for cover we do not use?
What to read before you ring
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We work with commercial clients in every state, by phone and video. Call 07 3292 1111.
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The information on this page is general in nature and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Before acting on it, consider whether it is appropriate for your circumstances. Where the information relates to a particular insurance product, consider the relevant Product Disclosure Statement before making a decision.