You can buy insurance without a broker. You can also represent yourself in court. The question is whether you should.

• Buy direct and nobody checks your cover or your sum insured.
• A typical broker often skips the rebuild figure and the roof.
• We commission a desktop building replacement valuation at no cost to you and run more than 1,200 roof checks a year.

You choose from a menu. You pick a sum insured, usually a guess, because nobody there checks it. Nobody asks about your circumstances.

The real danger is rarely the headline exclusions. It is the endorsements in the schedule and the sub-limits in the wording. A form does not flag them.

In our experience, owners buying this way commonly set their sum insured 20 to 40 per cent lower than they need.

The reason is legal. A direct insurer typically gives general advice, or none. It is not required to settle your fear that the building would not be properly rebuilt. A broker giving personal advice is.

What an insurer's calculator can and cannot do

A published determination from December 2024 concerns a home building policy, so it decides nothing about commercial cover. The owner set the cover at $495,000 using the insurer's own tools. A fire made the home a total loss, and the insurer's own builder quotes came in above $637,000. The insurer paid the sum insured plus the policy's additional benefits, and no more.

The Australian Financial Complaints Authority found the tools "are estimations only and the responsibility falls upon the person/s seeking cover to ensure it is fit for their individual needs". It added: "the insurer is not able to provide the complainant with financial advice about what to insure her property for because it is not licenced to do so."

The same boundary sits in a commercial policy. That is our point, not the determination's.

Going direct does not avoid the underinsurance (co-insurance) clause either. How the co-insurance clause works.

At renewal, a typical broker might get two or three like-for-like quotes and ask "has anything changed?" A good renewal asks specific questions. Who is your current tenant? How much rent, including outgoings, are they paying, excluding GST? What commonly gets skipped:

• A proper rebuild calculation.
• Renovations or improvements in the last twelve months.

Some brokers hide behind "we aren't a professional valuer". That is an excuse for not commissioning one.

A broker who did not ask

In a determination reported in August 2025, the Australian Financial Complaints Authority found a broker liable for $296,952. The broker had not made reasonable enquiries about an undisclosed manufacturing tenant, or the asbestos and EPS panel risk in the building. The sum insured was $2 million against a real rebuild cost of $6.25 million. The insurer had declined the claim and cancelled the policy.

Where going direct makes sense: Direct Insurer vs Insurance Broker.

• Desktop valuation, checked. We commission a desktop building replacement valuation at no cost to you, to the standard the policy wordings recognise. On several wordings we place, insuring at the full valuation figure switches the underinsurance penalty off. We commission it for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you. The report is a registered valuer's desktop assessment. How the valuation works.
• Roof condition, checked. We run more than 1,200 roof condition checks a year using aerial imagery. The roof is where most storm claims are won or lost on the maintenance-exclusion argument. How roof monitoring works.
• A panel that stays honest. Up to nine insurers write comparable business pack wordings on the Steadfast Client Trading Platform. We can put their quotes side by side, plus a further quote where it is competitive, and remarket every year.
• Paid transparently. What we are paid is disclosed in dollars on every invoice, to every client, as it has been since 2010.

One honest caution. Taking the same risk to several brokers to "shop it around" does not get a better price. Insurers tend to withdraw or worsen pricing when one risk is quoted repeatedly. Pick one broker to own it and run the market once.

When the check comes too late: a real storm claim

In a 2025 storm claim CIB handled, a landlord had insured a building for $500,000 against the roughly $1.99 million we advised in writing. The average clause cut the partial-loss payout to about 48 cents in the dollar. CIB found two wording points the client's claims advocate had missed, and the insurer amended the settlement onto our figure. The full story is in My insurer cut my claim for underinsurance. Can I challenge it?.

When the check comes early: a real on-site valuation

No, a builder's estimate is not enough to set a sum insured. A builder's rough estimate prices the cost to put a structure up, not the full cost to reinstate a whole site after a total loss, and the gap can be enormous. In a 2026 on-site valuation CIB paid for as a one-off, the rebuild cost came out at roughly 2.8 times the builder's estimate. The line-by-line is on our valuation page.

Sometimes the premium is slightly higher, sometimes lower. The better question: if your sum insured is $500,000 short, does the $200 you saved matter that day?

Our Steadfast policies often carry higher sub-limits, especially for business property. Removal of debris and professional fees are paid on top of the building sum insured, not carved out of it.

Both quotes were for the same $1,000,000 sum insured. Your building and figures will differ.

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• What "award-winning" insurance actually means: William's own explanation of what an award badge does, and does not, tell you.