Commercial insurance brokers for Sydney

Most of our clients have been spread across Australia since 2010, and New South Wales is a large part of that: a substantial share of the commercial buildings we insure are in NSW. Our offices are in New Farm, Brisbane, and in Bundaberg, and one named person holds your file from one renewal to the next.

What decides whether a Sydney building is properly covered is not who is nearest to it. It is whether anybody has recently tested the sum insured against a real rebuild figure, read what the wording excludes, and gone back to the market instead of accepting the renewal. Those are desk jobs, and they are the ones that get skipped.

The one thing that cannot be settled at a desk is what the building would cost to rebuild, so it gets its own assessment: a registered valuer's desktop assessment of the rebuild figure, produced the same way for a Surry Hills warehouse conversion as for anything in Brisbane.

This is the Sydney version of a national problem. Non-residential building construction costs across Australia rose 4.4% in the year to June 2026, and about 40% since 2018 (ABS Producer Price Indexes, construction, released 31/07/2026), and insurer indexation does not keep pace with that. What makes it easier to miss here is that the property keeps getting more valuable for reasons that have nothing to do with what a builder would charge.

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, and if you think our number is wrong, your own formal valuation sets the basis instead.

What a shortfall costs you depends entirely on the kind of loss. A fire that takes out one floor is a partial loss, and the average clause reduces the payment in proportion to how far the sum insured fell short, so cover at 60 per cent against a wording that tests at 80 recovers about three-quarters. A total loss is a different problem with the opposite shape: you are paid the full sum insured, nothing is deducted at all, and it still does not rebuild a Sydney building at Sydney prices.

A lot of Sydney commercial stock is let, often to tenants on leases signed years apart: a ground-floor shop in Marrickville with two suites above it, or four units of a Wetherill Park estate on separate agreements. The lease rather than the title usually decides who insures the glass, the air conditioning, the fitout and the loss of rent, and two tenancies in the same building can sit on different answers.

So we read the lease and set the covers against it. It is unglamorous and it is exactly where the gaps sit: a plant item nobody insured because each side assumed the other had, or loss-of-rent cover that does not match what the leases oblige the tenants to pay. Where a building has several tenants we also prepare an individual premium invoice for each of them rather than handing you one bill to divide up, though the lease still decides what each tenant owes and the policy still belongs in your name.

Then there is the name on the policy itself. In Sydney, where buildings are held through trusts and restructured every few years, the entity that owns the building and the entity named as insured drift apart quietly. That is a paperwork problem right up until the moment it becomes a money problem.