Where to Place?

[Shane Wilson]

Another newbie question. My target niche is real estate investors as that's my background. I feel that I have a good carrier list for individual houses or small landlord portfolios. However, I'm getting requests to quote 20+ unit apartment complexes, one request for a 20 unit condo association with an umbrella, one request for an office building. I'm in GA / TN. I've been running some quotes through Chubb / USLI through NBS / BHHC a few others but they are not competitive with the policies already in place so far or certain aspects of the properties resulted in declines. I'm trying to research other carriers, E&S/wholesalers, etc that I can turn to in for these bigger properties but it's pretty overwhelming trying to sort through all of them and which would make sense to sign up with. What would be your recommendations on where to place these property types?

 

[Al3x Lee]

What carriers are you competing against? What are the provisions of the existing policies? Such as - Are they replacement cost with a special form?

There are quite a few carriers on the west coast who will write condo associates with 20+ units. You'll want to look at their bylaws and see what the association is actually supposed to be insuring. Sometimes they're over or under-insured based on their own rules in the bylaws. You can use that as leverage to wedge your way in too.

 

[NY independent]

As far as wholesalers go, most have the same markets so you really need to establish a relationship with one and drill down with one underwriter there that gets things done for you. It usually takes a while to refine this though. Nowadays, the larger wholesalers (RT/Amwins, etc) are using verticals within the organization so different people handle different coverage parts of the same account. This makes the refinement even tougher. Good luck with things.