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

Quick answerBuying direct means choosing your cover from a menu with nobody checking whether your choice fits. Nobody asks about your circumstances, nobody checks your sum insured against what your building would really cost to rebuild, and nobody looks at your roof. You get a product. You do not get advice. If something in the wording does not fit your situation, you find out at claim time, when it is too late to fix it.

When you buy direct, here is what actually happens. You go to a website or a call centre, choose from a menu of options, pick a sum insured (usually a guess, because nobody there is going to check it for you), accept the terms, and hope it works. Direct insurers do not enquire into your personal circumstances or find out what you are actually trying to achieve. That is not a criticism of them. It is simply not what a product sale involves.

The most dangerous things in a direct policy are rarely the headline exclusions. They are the endorsements buried in the schedule that quietly limit or exclude cover, and the sub-limits hidden inside the wording that reduce what you actually get paid at claim time. A form does not flag these for you. You are expected to find them yourself, in a document written for insurers, not for you.

Direct insurers do offer commercial building insurance. But because many of their products carry smaller sub-limits, and because nobody explains how removal of debris or professional fees actually work at claim time, in our experience it is common for someone buying this way to set their building sum insured 20 to 40 per cent lower than what they actually need, without ever knowing it. The gap does not show up on the policy schedule. It shows up on the day you claim.

There is a legal reason this happens, and it is worth understanding rather than resenting. General advice talks to you in a generalist way, the same information for everyone. Personal advice is tailored to your circumstances, so the cover actually meets your needs. It matters because most people carry real uncertainty about their insurance and are genuinely afraid of paying a premium for years only to find their building would not be properly rebuilt. A direct sale is not required to resolve that uncertainty for you. A broker giving personal advice is.

The internet is also full of instant quotes and friendly chatbots that will have you "covered" in five minutes. They are very good at being fast and pleasant. What none of them can do is stop and work out what you are actually afraid of losing, the thing that would genuinely hurt your business if it happened. A bot sells you a product. It does not protect you.

It is also worth knowing how the direct market is actually structured. Australia's largest insurance groups each sell through several brands, so getting two or three direct quotes that feel like shopping around can mean the same underwriter pricing you twice, wearing different logos. The market looks much bigger from the outside than it is, and only part of it has a shopfront at all.

When you buy direct you choose your own sum insured, with the insurer's calculator there to help. It feels like enough. It is worth knowing exactly how far that help is allowed to go.

Take a published determination about a home building policy. It is a residential case, and it decides nothing about commercial cover. The owner had set the cover at $495,000, using the tools the insurer provides for the job. The home was a total loss after a fire, and the insurer accepted the claim. Two builder quotes obtained by the insurer came back at $637,659 and $656,674, both well above the cover held. The insurer settled at the sum insured plus the additional benefits in the policy, and that was the end of it. The rest was the owner's to find.

The owner argued the insurer's calculation tools had produced a misleading figure. The Australian Financial Complaints Authority did not accept it, and its reasons are the part almost nobody is told. Those tools, it found, "are estimations only and the responsibility falls upon the person/s seeking cover to ensure it is fit for their individual needs". Then it explained why the insurer could not have taken that decision off the owner's hands: "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." Summing up the whole outcome, it said it again: "the insurer cannot provide advice to the complainant about what she should insure her home for. Ultimately, this is her decision."

That was a finding about the insurer in that determination, under its own licence, and not a rule that binds every insurer. What it shows is the shape of a direct sale rather than a fault in it. The tool gives you an estimate. The decision stays with you. Nobody in a direct sale has the job of testing that number against your actual building, and if it turns out short, the shortfall is yours. The owner in that case was awarded $2,000 for the way parts of the claim were handled, and nothing at all towards the gap.

That determination is about a home. The same boundary sits inside a commercial building policy, and that is our point rather than the determination's, because a determination about one home policy settles nothing about commercial cover. But the mechanism does not change with the building. If nobody is allowed to tell you whether your number is right, the number stays a guess until someone whose job it is goes and checks it. That is the whole difference between a product sale and advice, and it is the reason we work out what your cover actually has to do, test the figures against your real trading position, and commission a registered valuer's desktop assessment at no cost to you, so the figure your whole policy depends on is a valuer's number rather than one you were quietly left to choose on your own.

A calculator can give you a number. Only advice can tell you whether it is the right one.

And going direct does not get you out of the clause that catches most under-insured owners. One of Australia's largest insurers sells essentially the same commercial building policy both direct and through brokers, and both versions carry the identical underinsurance (co-insurance) clause, tested the same way, with the same worked example. Going direct does not get you a different or better clause. It gets you exactly the same clause, with nobody keeping your sum insured right against it. On a partial loss that clause scales your payout down in proportion to how far short you were; on a total loss you are paid your sum insured in full and no more, and the gap to real rebuild cost is yours either way. The full mechanics are in The Co-Insurance Clause: What Every Building Owner Must Know.

Quick answerEvery gap described above is one we build our process to close. We commission a desktop building replacement valuation at no cost to you, so your number is a valuer's figure, not a guess. We run more than 1,200 roof condition checks a year, so the part of your building most likely to cause a disputed claim gets looked at before the storm does. And we give you personal advice, on a panel we hold to account every year, and we own that advice.

Desktop valuation, checked. We commission a desktop building replacement valuation at no cost to you, prepared to the standard the policy wordings actually recognise. On several of the wordings we place, a current valuation like this does more than make your number accurate. Insuring at its full figure switches the underinsurance penalty clause off your policy altogether. The desktop valuation is commissioned for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you. See Desktop Building Replacement Valuation for exactly how that works.

Roof condition, checked. We run more than 1,200 roof condition checks a year across our client base using aerial imagery, because the roof is where most storm claims are won or lost on the maintenance-exclusion argument. We look before the storm does, not after. See Roof Condition Monitoring.

Personal advice, owned. We can give you personal advice and make recommendations across a range of products. A direct insurer just sells you a product. That difference is not a technicality. It is the reason a renewal conversation with us sounds like "who is your tenant now, and what are they paying?" instead of "has anything changed?"

A panel that stays honest. We place your cover on the Steadfast Client Trading Platform, where up to nine insurers write the same business pack wording, so we can put up to nine quotes side by side, plus a further quote where it is competitive. We remarket that panel every year. A renewal with us is a decision, not a default.

You get a fast reply. Our aim is to get back to a new enquiry within 90 minutes during business hours, 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday, because a question about your cover deserves a real answer today, not a callback next week.

Paid transparently. We are paid a commission by the insurer, built into the premium, and a broker fee for our professional service in addition to that commission or in place of it, and whatever we are paid is disclosed in dollars on every invoice, to every client, as it has been since we opened in 2010. As far as we know, that still makes us one of the few brokerages in Australia that does. We would rather you knew exactly how we are paid than wondered.

One honest caution, because it protects you too. Taking the same risk to several different brokers to "shop it around" does not get you a better price. It tends to do the opposite: insurers withdraw or worsen their pricing when the same risk is quoted repeatedly through different channels. The better move is to pick one broker you trust to own it, and let them run the market on your behalf, properly, once.

Quick answerA broker's policy is not always more expensive than going direct, and comparing them fairly means comparing apples with apples, not just the number at the bottom of the page. Our Steadfast business pack cover often carries meaningfully higher sub-limits, especially for business property, while the premium is typically on par or only a little higher. On one real building we compared, broker-placed cover offered around 40 per cent more protection for under 5 per cent more premium.

Does a broker cost more? Sometimes the premium is slightly higher. Sometimes it is lower. But that is the wrong question to ask first. The right one is: if your building is damaged and your sum insured turns out to be $500,000 short, does the $200 you saved on premium actually matter to you that day?

Comparing apples for apples, a broker's policy generally will not cost you much more. Our Steadfast policies, placed through the Steadfast Client Trading Platform, often carry meaningfully higher sub-limits, especially for business property, and one of their strongest protections is that removal of debris and professional fees are paid on top of your building sum insured, not carved out of it.

Here is what that difference looked like in dollars on one real building we compared. A building insured at $1,000,000 for a $4,900 premium is a fairly typical direct-style quote. Insure the same building at the same $1,000,000 through our Steadfast panel and the premium runs to around $5,100, roughly 5 per cent more. But the cover looks very different: a limit of liability up to $1,200,000, plus a further $200,000 specifically for removal of debris. That is up to around 40 per cent more genuine cover for under 5 per cent more premium, and on its own that gap can massively reduce, or remove entirely, the underinsurance shortfall that catches so many owners at claim time. Your building and your figures will differ, but the shape of the gap is what matters.

It is also worth knowing that some of the insurers on our panel do not deal with customers direct at all. That is not a sales line, it is simply part of how the commercial insurance market is structured. Going direct means choosing from the part of the market that has a shopfront, not the whole market.

None of this means we are the cheapest option, and we will not tell you we are. Fit-for-purpose insurance at a competitive rate is the standard we hold ourselves to, not the lowest number on the page, and not the most expensive either, but cover that is actually built to do what you need it to do when something goes wrong.