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 answer
The 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.
Short answers
Do you have a Geelong office?
No. Consolidated Insurance Brokers looks after Geelong clients from our New Farm office in Brisbane, with one named account manager across every renewal. What your building needs is someone asking what goes on inside it now and putting that to the market accurately: a conversation, not a site visit. We do have a representative based in Melbourne though that is a person on the end of a phone rather than a shopfront. Both our offices are on the locations page.
We use an old factory building differently from the last tenant. What has to be told to the insurer?
What actually happens in there now. Consolidated Insurance Brokers reads your schedule against the current use of the building, because the trade, the processes, what is stored, how much of the floor space is in use and the hours it is occupied are what rating follows. They are what a schedule stops describing after a change of tenant. It is a conversation rather than a form, and far better had at a review than in the middle of a claim.
The building is far bigger than our business needs. Are we paying for cover we do not use?
Not in the way it feels. Consolidated Insurance Brokers helps you set the building sum insured on what it would cost to put the structure back, not on how much of it you occupy, so an underused building still needs a full rebuild figure behind it. What does change with occupancy is the trade description and the contents and stock figures. Those are worth revisiting if half the floor is standing empty.
Don't see your area?
We work with commercial clients in every state, by phone and video. Call 07 3292 1111.
Talk to a broker about your Geelong building
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