Commercial insurance brokers for Melbourne
Melbourne's industrial floor space runs west through Truganina and Laverton North, south-east through Dandenong South, and hardest of all north through Epping and Somerton. On a footprint that size, a small error per square metre is not a small error.
A big Melbourne shed is the easiest building in the country to underinsure. Nothing about it looks wrong until somebody has to rebuild it.
For owners, landlords and occupiers of warehouses, factories, offices and commercial buildings across Melbourne. If you occupy the building rather than own it, business owners who rent is the better starting point.
Who actually looks after a Melbourne policy
Most of our clients sit a long way from either of our offices, and that has been true since 2010. The offices are in New Farm, Brisbane, and in Bundaberg. Your account manager is one named person, and you will not be handed to a service desk on the day something happens.
What an underwriter prices on a Melbourne industrial building is floor area, construction, what is stored inside it, how high it is stacked, what fire protection exists and what the tenants actually do. Those fields move a quote more than anything else, and they are the ones most often stale on a policy that has rolled over untouched.
None of that is improved by a broker being in the same postcode. It is improved by somebody doing the work and then telling you plainly what they found.
Why is a Melbourne warehouse so easy to underinsure?
Quick answerBecause the number is large and nobody checks large numbers. A warehouse sum insured is usually floor area multiplied by a rate somebody used years ago, or worse, the price paid for the property. Both drift, and on a big footprint a small error per square metre becomes a very large error overall. A rebuild figure is the only thing that resets it.
Two separate cost series say the same thing. Building materials are 30% higher than three years ago, and rose 4.3% in the 12 months to February 2025 (Insurance Council of Australia). Separately, and on a different basis, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has non-residential building construction prices up 4.4% over the year to the June quarter of 2026. The two measure different things and should never be added together, but they point the same way.
The reason that matters more here than on a shop is arithmetic. An error of a few hundred dollars per square metre is trivial across a small tenancy and enormous across a distribution shed, and nothing on the renewal notice reveals it, because a renewal reprices the figure you gave rather than checking it.
So we commission a desktop valuation at no cost to you, a registered valuer's desktop assessment of the rebuild figure, 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 it, which is a floor rather than full protection: these wordings test the sum insured against at least 80 per cent of the building's value.
Below that line the two kinds of loss hurt differently. A fire in one bay is a partial loss and the average clause cuts the payment in proportion to the shortfall. Lose the whole shed and it is a total loss: you are paid the full sum insured, nothing is deducted, and on a footprint this size the distance between that figure and the real one is the part that ends a business.
Racking, sprinklers, and what is actually in there
Two sheds of the same size are not the same risk. What is stored, how high it is stacked, whether the racking is protected, whether the building is sprinklered and what that system was designed for are all part of the price.
The catch is that those things change and the schedule does not. A tenant changes, the stock changes, racking goes up another level, a mezzanine appears. Nobody sets out to mislead an insurer; the description simply stops describing the building.
Building work is the same story. Most commercial property wordings carry a limited allowance for alterations and additions rather than open cover for a construction project. What yours allows is in your own wording, and it makes for a much better conversation before the builder starts than after.
What Melbourne clients say
Debbie Blanco was very helpful and knowledgeable in getting us insurance for a commercial property in Melbourne
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Insuring in Melbourne: the common questions
Do you have a Melbourne office?
Does a sprinkler system change what we pay?
We are extending the building. Does the policy cover the works?
What to read before you ring
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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.