Jodie Fraser – Founder and Host of Beyond Four Walls
It’s probably fair to say that insurance it isn’t the part of residential property management that gets most people excited.
For many leaseholders, it’s generally the largest figure that appears in the service charge budget and for property managers, renewal can mean questionnaires, valuations, claims histories, endless emails and sometimes difficult conversations about increasing premiums.
But when I recently sat down with Sinead Campbell, Branch Director at Residentsline, for an episode of Beyond Four Walls, something really stood out to me.
We spend an awful lot of time talking about the cost of insurance, but perhaps not enough time talking about its value.
There is also a huge amount that happens behind the scenes before a quotation ever lands in a property manager’s inbox.
What Sinead really puts across in this episode is that a good broker isn’t simply forwarding information to an insurer and sending back a price. They’re understanding the building, presenting the risk, approaching the right markets, negotiating terms and looking at the detail of the cover being offered.
And it’s important to remember that the cheapest policy isn’t necessarily the best policy. An insurance premium might look fantastic until the day somebody actually needs to rely on the cover and discovers an exclusion, an excess or a limitation they didn’t fully understand.
That’s where communication and education become incredibly important and one of the things I regularly talk about in property management is our responsibility to explain things properly. We work in an industry filled with terminology that makes complete sense to those of us who use it every day, but very little sense to the person receiving a service charge demand at home. And insurance is no different.
We shouldn’t expect leaseholders or RMC directors to understand every aspect of a policy. But we should make sure they have enough information to understand what they are paying for, why decisions have been made and what questions they should be asking.
And that requires a relationship between the managing agent and broker that extends beyond an annual email saying: “It’s renewal time.”
The more a broker understands about a building, its history and the challenges surrounding it, the better equipped they are to represent that risk. Equally, the better a property manager understands the insurance process, the better they can communicate it to their clients and residents, and that behind all of this, there are people.
People building careers, leading teams, balancing work with parenthood and everything else life throws at us. The same people trying to find solutions when a building presents a complicated risk.
And ultimately, the people living in the buildings we manage and that’s the bit we should never lose sight of.
Insurance may involve policies, premiums, claims histories and spreadsheets, but at the end of all of it is someone’s home.
And perhaps that should always be where the conversation starts.
You can listen or watch the full episode on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or YouTube
