Commercial insurance brokers for Wollongong and the Illawarra
Heavy industrial estates, steel-adjacent trades and a city centre rebuilding around what is already there: Illawarra premises are rated on construction and on the work going on inside them.
Two Illawarra sheds on the same street can be priced worlds apart. What they are built of, and what happens inside them, is why.
For owners and occupiers of industrial units, workshops, factories and commercial buildings across Wollongong, Port Kembla and the Illawarra. If you lease the unit rather than own it, start at business owners who rent.
How we look after Illawarra clients
We deliberately built a book that spans the country and have done since 2010, and New South Wales buildings are a large part of it. The two offices are New Farm in Brisbane and Bundaberg. That is where the brokers sit; it is not where our clients have to be, and the same named account manager is on your file this year and next.
Illawarra industrial risks are won or lost on description. Construction, occupancy, the processes running inside the building and the housekeeping around them are what an underwriter is really pricing, and they are the fields most often stale on a policy that has been renewed rather than reviewed.
That is reading and phone calls, and it works the same way for a Port Kembla workshop as for a building down the road from our office.
Why are two similar Wollongong workshops priced so differently?
Quick answer
Because an underwriter is not pricing the postcode. It is pricing what the building is made of, what is stored in it, what processes run inside it, and how far a fire would travel before something stopped it. Two units on the same estate can sit a long way apart on all four, and your policy schedule is where those answers are recorded.
Construction is the first lever. A steel-framed shed with masonry walls, a shed clad in insulated sandwich panel and an older brick workshop are three different risks before anybody looks at what happens inside them, and panel type in particular is something underwriters now ask about specifically. If your schedule still says what somebody wrote a decade ago, that is what is being priced.
The second lever is the work itself. Welding, grinding, cutting and other hot work is rated differently from assembly and storage, and commercial wordings commonly attach conditions to it: what has to be cleared, watched and checked before and after. Those conditions are worth reading before a claim rather than during one.
The third is what is in the building. Stacked stock, flammable materials, gas, batteries and the height it is all stored at change the fire load and the sprinkler question. Steel-adjacent trades tend to accumulate all of it quietly, a pallet at a time, between renewals.
Eight units under one roof, and the sum insured that only covers yours
A lot of Illawarra industrial space is a row of units under a single roof, and that raises two questions the renewal notice will never ask you. What actually separates your unit from the one next door, and whose sum insured is meant to put the building back if a fire runs the length of it.
Fire separation between units is a construction question with an insurance answer. Where units are separated to a proper standard the risk is contained. Where a common roof space runs above the dividing walls it is not, and both the price and the exposure change accordingly.
Then there is the figure itself. We commission a desktop valuation at no cost to you, a registered valuer's desktop assessment of the rebuild cost, commissioned for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you, and on the commercial-building business pack policies we place we will not write cover below 60% of it. 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.
Fall short of that and it costs you twice over, in two different ways. A partial loss, a fire that runs a section of the roof space, is cut by the average clause in proportion to the shortfall. A total loss pays the full sum insured, deducts nothing at all, and still leaves you short of a rebuilt unit.
Short answers
Do you have a Wollongong office?
No. Consolidated Insurance Brokers looks after Illawarra clients from our New Farm office in Brisbane, and the work that decides whether your unit is properly covered, reading the wording, getting the construction described accurately, going back to the market, is done at a desk rather than on your slab. You get one named account manager rather than a call centre. Our offices are listed on our locations page.
We do welding and hot work in our workshop. What does the policy expect of us?
More than most owners realise, and it is written down. Hot work is rated differently from assembly and storage, and Consolidated Insurance Brokers goes through what a wording expects of it in a client review. Commercial wordings commonly attach conditions to hot work, such as clearing the area, keeping a watch during and after the work, and having the right equipment to hand. What yours requires is in your own policy, worth reading now rather than after a fire.
Our unit is one of eight under one roof. Does that matter?
It can matter a great deal. Send Consolidated Insurance Brokers the current schedule along with the strata plan or the lease, and we will work out which parts of that building are yours to insure and which are not. How your unit is separated from the ones either side decides how far a fire would travel, which affects both what you pay and how much of the building your own sum insured is really carrying.
Don't see your area?
We work with commercial clients in every state, by phone and video. Call 07 3292 1111.
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