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

• Insurers can read dated aerial imagery for rust, ponding water, patch repairs and blocked box gutters.
• We check your roof on Nearmap aerial imagery at quote and at every renewal, at no extra cost.
• If we find something, you get a Roof Condition Alert with the imagery and the clause an insurer would point to.

Gradual deterioration is damage that built up slowly: rust, age, perished seals, worn flashing. On the wordings we place it is excluded, because insurance is built to cover accidents, not upkeep.

Picture a storm that lifts sheeting off your roof and lets water pour in. You claim, and the insurer pulls dated aerial imagery from before the storm. It shows rust bleeding from the fixings, water pooling in a low spot and a patch over a known weak point. Now it can argue the roof was already failing, and the storm just finished it off. If that holds, your claim can be reduced or refused under the wear-and-tear or gradual deterioration exclusion.

Most wordings also carry a write-back. The exclusion applies to the roof itself, but damage the failure causes to other property can still be paid. So a worn-out roof that lets water in during a storm can be declined for the repair while the soaked stock, ceiling and fitout beneath it are still covered.

A published determination: decay on display for years

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. In the April 2023 determination, 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.

Insurers and their assessors increasingly review dated aerial imagery and AI-derived roof-condition analysis before they pay a claim. An assessor looks for five signs, all visible from the air:

• Rust and corrosion. Bleeding from fixings, laps and screw points: the clearest sign a metal roof was already failing.
• Ponding water. Standing water on a low-pitched or flat roof, and its staining. Ponding does not happen overnight.
• Missing or loose material. Tiles, sheeting or flashing out of place before the storm.
• Patch or temporary repairs. A known weak spot the owner did not properly fix.
• Blocked or overflowing box gutters. A maintenance failure an assessor can call the real cause of water ingress.

Any one of these, in imagery dated before your loss, is an opening. The answer is not to fear the imagery. It is to look at your own roof before your insurer does, and fix what you find.

Check your own roof risk in two minutes

In our experience some insurers read the imagery before any claim, too. When we go back to ask for a better rate on an automatically priced policy, it can prompt a fresh look at the whole risk. They read the property from above and from the street: general condition, skip bins, and now the roof. A decline can follow, especially where ponding or rust shows and waste sits too close to the building. The most competitive insurers are usually the ones doing this, so the best terms are the ones at risk.

We review your roof on Nearmap aerial imagery at quote and at every renewal, the same yearly rhythm that keeps your desktop building replacement valuation current.

If we find a problem, we recommend you get a roofing contractor to fix it. Once it is fixed, the insurer's argument is gone.

It does not replace a physical inspection. We review aerial imagery of your roof and tell you what condition it looks to be in. Nobody attends the property, and it is not a building inspection.

The dates work for you too. Comparing repeat captures, looking straight down, shows when something changed. Rust in an earlier capture and gone in a later one narrows a repair to a window. If an insurer argues a problem was there all along, that dated record is evidence of the opposite.

It runs alongside the desktop building replacement valuation we commission at no cost to you, for our purposes as your broker, to inform our advice. Both are one annual service.

Years of premiums and no claims do not change the question: what caused the roof to fail? A policy does not price loyalty, and no broker can make it do so. What helps is a conversation years earlier, in writing, while there was time to act.

Not a phone call telling you to "keep an eye on it". A document that shows exactly what we saw on your roof and why it matters, in your policy's own words.

We 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.

At renewal, usually only the price gets checked. The roof, the part most likely to fail and be argued over, waits until something goes wrong. Most brokers have no standing access to aerial imagery, and fewer have built it into an annual process.

This is not a claim about outcomes. We do not promise a claim will be paid because we checked, and we never will. We promise to look, tell you plainly what we find, and give you the chance to fix it first.