The Expert Podcast

This article is supposed to be about insurance costs for multi-family homes, apartment buildings, and duplexes, but if you scroll through, buried in this article is another very important piece of information that has to do with insurance rates for commercial insurance, and this is an outlook for 2023.

What's happening with insurance rates? For multi-family property, up 20 to 50 percent. Your insurance premiums are going to go up that much in 2023. Commercial property rates range from 10 to 20 percent. Catastrophic Peril, so if you're in an area that has a windstorm, earthquake, fire, or anything that's a catastrophic type of peril that's not covered by normal homeowners, that could go up 75 to 200 percent.

So if you have a windstorm that costs two thousand dollars a year, that might be three or four thousand dollars a year next year. Catastrophic perils for low-hazard zones where you don't live in an earthquake zone, a fire zone, or a hurricane zone might only go up 20 percent. GL is above flat work comp is flat umbrella or excess liability if you're adding layers of coverage to your business it might go up 20 but here look at Cyber at the very bottom this is where we're really looking at some increases these cyber policies are really in flux right now where they could be quite a bit higher in the coming year.

One of the things we are finding is that existing policies aren't going up as much as new premiums. So if you have an existing policy, let's say if you have a thousand dollar a year or $1200 a year premium, it might go up, you know, 100 bucks or maybe 200, but new policy premiums for the same risk might be 50 percent higher. And that's because the insurers are considering that existing policyholders are already kind of in their family; they're already putting in best practices; they have some risk knowledge. We're a new client, so there might not be that same understanding of exposure.

So that's one of the things that a lot of brokers and agents are seeing: that existing policies may not be jumping up as much at renewal time, whereas a new policy might be a lot higher. So this is important data buried in this article about commercial or real estate coverage cyber liability, which is 20 to 50 percent higher than previous years.

The other thing to watch out for is making sure you're not underinsured. Sometimes, when there is coverage, it will be less than what is needed to adequately protect the property owner or the company. So make sure you're getting enough coverage, sufficient coverage for your risk so you don't be in a position where you have coverage but the loss exceeds your policy limit.