Commercial insurance brokers for Perth
Perth commercial buildings run on the same wordings as the eastern states and get rebuilt in a different market. Which insurers see the risk, and what a rebuild really costs here, are the two things worth getting right.
Perth is the furthest a rebuild has to travel for anything it cannot get locally, and that is a cost your sum insured has to be carrying.
For owners and occupiers of commercial buildings, industrial units, offices and business premises from the Perth CBD out through Canning Vale, Malaga and Welshpool. Leasing rather than owning? Business owners who rent is your side of it.
Two hours ahead of you, which turns out to help
Most of our clients have been spread across Australia since 2010, and a good many of them have never met their broker in person. Ours sit in New Farm, Brisbane, and in Bundaberg, and your file belongs to one named account manager rather than to a queue.
Being on the east coast is worth being straight about rather than glossing over. Our offices answer their own phones 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday, Brisbane time, which is 6am to 4pm in Perth. Somebody is at a desk here well before most Perth businesses open, so a first-thing call gets a first-thing answer. The other side of that is real too: 4pm your time is the end of our day, so a late-afternoon call is better booked than assumed.
Everything a commercial policy actually needs is reading, market work and phone calls: testing the sum insured, checking what the wording excludes, going back to the market at renewal, arguing a claim that has been underpaid. None of it is improved by somebody standing in your car park.
Does being in Perth change how a commercial building is insured?
Quick answerNot the process and not the wording, which are national. What changes is the market around your building. Which insurers are genuinely interested in a Western Australian risk is not the same question as it is in Sydney, and what a rebuild costs and how long it takes depends on trades and materials that may have a long way to come.
Insurer appetite is not uniform. On the Steadfast Client Trading Platform, nine insurers subscribe to the business pack wording most commercial buildings sit on, so a building placed there can be tested against up to nine quotes rather than one renewal notice. Which of those nine actually want a Western Australian risk varies by trade and by construction, and it moves as insurers change what they want to write.
That is one of the arguments for going back to the market every year rather than letting the incumbent keep the policy by default, and we remarket every policy we hold at each renewal.
The other half is the rebuild itself. Specialist materials, plant and trades that are readily available in an eastern capital have further to come, and that shows up as both cost and time. Cost is what the building sum insured has to carry. Time is the part a property policy does not pay for at all, which is what the business interruption section exists to cover, and it is the half most often set too short.
What a Perth rebuild figure has to carry
Materials alone are 30% dearer than they were three years ago, and rose 4.3% in the 12 months to February 2025 (Insurance Council of Australia). That is a national figure, and it is only the starting point for a building that also has to be reached.
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, and we work from that rather than from last year's number plus a bit. 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.
Sit under that line and the two kinds of loss punish you differently. A partial loss is reduced by the average clause in proportion to the shortfall. A total loss pays the full sum insured with nothing deducted, and the shortfall arrives instead as the distance between that cheque and what a builder here will actually charge to start again.
Insuring in Perth: the common questions
Do you have a Perth office?
You are on the east coast. When can we actually reach you?
Do the same insurers cover a Perth building?
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.