Your insurer already knows what your roof looks like. Do you?

Quick answerGradual deterioration is damage that built up slowly, rust, age, perished seals, worn flashing, rather than damage from one sudden event. Every commercial policy excludes it, because insurance is built to cover accidents, not the maintenance that comes with owning a building. The line that decides your claim is sudden versus gradual, and your insurer is trained to argue for gradual whenever it can.

Picture a storm that lifts sheeting off your roof and lets water pour into the building below. You lodge a claim. Your insurer sends an assessor, and before they even inspect the roof, they pull dated aerial imagery from before the storm. It shows rust bleeding from the fixings, water pooling in a low spot, a patch repair over a known weak point. Now the insurer has an argument: this roof was already failing. The storm did not cause the damage, it just finished off a problem that was years in the making. That argument, if it holds, can see your claim reduced or refused under the wear-and-tear or gradual deterioration exclusion that sits in every commercial property wording.

Here is the line that decides it. If the cause of the loss was a sudden, identifiable event, a storm, hail, fire, that is what your policy is built to pay for. If the cause was the building simply ageing, rust that ate through steel over five winters, seals that perished, flashing that slowly worked loose, insurers treat that as upkeep you were always going to have to fund yourself, and every commercial policy says so.

There is a fairer part of this most owners never hear about. Most wordings carry a write-back: the exclusion applies to the roof itself, but damage the failure causes to other property can still be paid. In practice, a worn-out roof that lets water in during a storm can be declined for the roof repair itself while the soaked stock, the ruined ceiling and the fitout beneath it are still covered. That split is real, and it cuts both ways, which is exactly why it matters to know where you stand before you are relying on it. We explain the full mechanics, the exact wording language, and real published determinations in How Your Roof Condition Affects Insurance Claims. For what your building policy covers more broadly, see Commercial Building Insurance.

In a published determination, the owner of a heritage building in inner Melbourne claimed after a storm on 29/01/2021 that dropped about 44mm of rain. When the dispute reached the Australian Financial Complaints Authority, the free ombudsman that settles insurance disputes, the insurer's engineer produced years of Google Street View images of the building showing the parapet mortar had been crumbling since at least 2007. The determination found the storm was the trigger and not the real cause of the damage, and the claim was declined. The insurer was directed to pay the owner $1,000 for the way the matter was handled, and nothing for the repair.

That was a home, in another state, and the same kind of exclusion sits in the commercial building wordings we place here in Queensland. Storm cover does not pay for damage that was already there.

Here is the part worth sitting with. The decay was on public display for more than a decade before it failed. It was not hidden, and it was not sudden. A neighbour had been asking the owner to get it repaired for a long time, and the determination counts that warning among the evidence it found persuasive. What was never there was a documented, expert record of the building's condition, arriving every year, of the kind an owner and an insurer both take seriously. That is the gap the roof checks from Consolidated Insurance Brokers close: someone looks at the condition of your roof every year and puts in writing what is changing, while it is still a maintenance decision and not a claims dispute.

Quick answerWe review your roof on Nearmap aerial imagery at the time of quote and again at every renewal, more than 1,200 checks a year across our clients. If we see a problem, we send you a Roof Condition Alert with the imagery and the specific issue we found. We tell you the exact exclusion clause an insurer would point to, so you understand your risk in plain language, and we recommend you get a roofing contractor out to fix it. Once it is remediated, that argument is off the table.

Here is the plan:

1. Your roof gets reviewed on Nearmap aerial imagery at the time of quote and at every renewal, the same yearly rhythm we use to keep your desktop valuation current. We run more than 1,200 of these checks a year across our client base.
2. If we find something, rust, ponding, a patch repair, a blocked box gutter, we send you a Roof Condition Alert: the imagery, plainly marked, with what we found and why it matters.
3. The exact exclusion clause in your own policy wording gets referenced, so you know precisely what an insurer would point to if this went unaddressed, not a generic warning.
4. You get a recommendation to engage a roofing contractor to remediate the issue, on your terms and your timeline, while it is still a maintenance job.
5. Once it is fixed, the argument an insurer could have made is gone, and we note it against your file so next year's check has a clean baseline to work from.

The dates cut both ways, and this is the half that works for you. The same building is captured again and again, and comparing the passes looking straight down, so they line up properly, shows us when something changed. Rust that was there in an earlier capture and gone in a later one narrows a repair to a window. That matters, because the argument an insurer can run is that a problem was there all along. A dated record showing the roof was rusted, and then was not, is evidence of the opposite, and it belongs on your file long before anyone needs it. It also tends to be the moment an owner realises we have actually looked, rather than sent another letter.

This runs alongside, not instead of, the desktop building replacement valuation we commission at no cost to you (see Desktop Building Replacement Valuation). That desktop valuation is commissioned for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you; the roof check is part of the same annual service, at no extra cost to you.

An owner has been insured for many years and has never made a claim. Nothing has ever gone wrong, every premium has been paid, and a sense builds that the insurer owes something for that. Then the roof lets go. The question is what actually caused it, and the strongest evidence either way is what was done to look after the roof in all that time. A policy does not price loyalty, and no broker can make it do so. What helps most is a conversation that happened years earlier, in writing, while there was still time to act on it. That conversation is a large part of why this check exists, and why we would rather find something early than explain it late.

Quick answerWe are not aware of any other insurance broker in Australia that runs proactive roof condition checks using aerial imagery on every commercial building client, as standard, every year. Most brokers renew your policy and hope the roof holds. We look at it first.

Renewing a commercial building policy usually means one thing happens: the price gets checked. The roof, the part of the building most likely to fail and most likely to be argued over at claim time, does not get looked at again until something goes wrong. That is not a criticism of any one broker, it is simply how the industry has always worked, because most brokers do not have standing access to aerial imagery, and even fewer have built it into an annual process.

We are not aware of any other insurance broker in Australia that reviews every commercial building client's roof from the air, every year, as a standard part of the service, not an add-on you have to ask for. Insurers themselves are often surprised we already have this in hand; it is unusual for a broker to bring imagery evidence to the table rather than wait for the insurer's assessor to.

This is not a claim about outcomes. We do not promise a claim will be paid because we checked, and we never will. What we do promise is this: while most brokers renew and hope, we look, we tell you plainly what we find, and we give you the chance to fix it before an insurer ever gets the chance to argue about it.