Commercial insurance brokers for the Gold Coast
You do not need a broker with a Gold Coast address. You need one who reads your policy, tests your sum insured against a real rebuild figure, and tells you plainly what they found.
What your Gold Coast building cost to build and what it costs to rebuild today are two different numbers. Your policy only pays on one of them.
For owners, landlords and managers of commercial buildings, shops, offices and industrial units from Coomera to Coolangatta. If you rent your premises rather than own them, start at business owners who rent.
How we look after Gold Coast clients
Most of our clients are spread right across Australia, and have been since 2010. Our offices are in New Farm, Brisbane, and in Bundaberg, which is where the brokers sit rather than where the clients have to be. Your account manager is one named person at one of them, and you deal with that person from one renewal to the next rather than whoever answers.
Most of the work on a commercial building policy is reading. The schedule, the lease, the sum insured, the exclusions the last broker left sitting there. None of that needs an office up the road from your building. It needs somebody who will actually do it, and then ring you and explain what they found.
Two things about a building cannot be settled by reading a schedule: what it would cost to rebuild, and what condition the roof is in. Those get their own assessments, by a registered valuer and by our roof condition check. That is more use than a broker driving past.
Why does the sum insured catch Gold Coast owners out?
Quick answerBecause it stopped matching the building. Rebuild costs have risen sharply, insurer indexation adds a few per cent a year, and the two lines drift apart quietly between renewals. When a claim comes, a sum insured set on the old figure either triggers the average clause on a partial loss or simply runs out on a total one. The fix is a rebuild figure, not a percentage.
Building materials cost 30% more than three years ago, with a 4.3% rise in the 12 months to February 2025 (Insurance Council of Australia). A sum insured set before that and nudged up a few per cent each renewal does not catch up on its own.
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 put cover below 60% of that figure. If you think our number is wrong, commission your own formal valuation and that sets the basis instead. We can also arrange an on-site valuation rather than a desktop one, which is a service you pay for.
Sixty per cent is a floor, not full protection, and we would rather say so. These wordings test the sum insured against at least 80 per cent of the building's value, so at 60 per cent a partial loss still pays only around three-quarters of it. The floor exists to stop the worst outcome, not to make underinsurance safe.
It is worth being precise about how that hurts, because the two cases are different. On a partial loss, storm damage to one section of roof say, the co-insurance or average clause cuts the payout in proportion to how far short the sum insured was. On a total loss you are paid the full sum insured, and only then find out that the full sum insured does not rebuild the building.
Mixed use, strata title, and the questions a renewal never asks
A lot of Gold Coast commercial stock is mixed use: retail at street level, offices or apartments above, often on a strata plan. That raises two questions your renewal notice will not ask you. Who insures what, the body corporate policy or yours? And is the entity named on the policy the entity that actually owns the lot?
In our experience that second one is a paperwork problem right up until the moment it becomes a money problem. We have caught it on a routine review before now: an owner-occupier insured under the wrong entity across several strata units, which is the sort of thing nobody wants to discover at claim time.
Roof condition is the other one. We run more than 1,200 roof condition checks a year across our book, and in our experience roof damage is the most common commercial property claim we see. A roof that has been patched rather than replaced is a claim waiting to be argued, and that argument is settled by what can be shown about its condition before the storm.
What Gold Coast clients say
Have been doing business with them for 10 years and Sheryll Todd’s professional approach makes it easy to keep coming back! Dan from Gold Coast plumbing
Read every review - shown as written, straight from Google →
Insuring on the Gold Coast: the common questions
Do I need a broker on the Gold Coast to insure a Gold Coast building?
Do you have a Gold Coast office?
Our Gold Coast building has shops downstairs and apartments above. Who insures what?
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.