I Wrote Something for the Alabama Center for Real Estate and It Starts with Football

I Wrote Something for the Alabama Center for Real Estate and It Starts with Football

Dan Wentz

I had a piece published this week through the Alabama Center for Real Estate at the University of Alabama's Culverhouse College of Business. It's called Your Commercial Insurance Renewal and What Football Has to Do With It.

If you own or manage commercial property in Alabama, it's worth five minutes of your time.

Here's the short version: everyone's celebrating a soft market right now. Rates are down, carriers are competing, and it feels like a win. And in some ways, it is. But the headline doesn't tell the whole story, and a few things happening underneath it can turn a good-looking renewal into a bad deal.

The article covers four areas where I'm seeing real exposure for Alabama property owners:

  • Roof age — carriers are verifying it themselves now with satellite data, and the thresholds haven't softened with the market. If your roof is pushing 20 years, you may be in for a wind/hail deductible that's a percentage of total insured value, not a flat dollar amount. On a $20M property, that's a very different number.
  • Geography — Alabama isn't one insurance market. What drives your renewal in Mobile looks nothing like what drives it in Huntsville or Birmingham. I break down what's actually happening in each region.
  • Liability for apartments and hotels — standard carriers have largely exited this space. Coverage has shifted to the surplus lines market, and assault and battery exclusions are common. If you haven't looked at your liability forms lately, you should.
  • Building values — industry estimates put roughly three-quarters of commercial properties underinsured by 40% or more. A rate decrease on the wrong insured value isn't a win.

The NIL analogy I use in the piece is one I keep coming back to in client conversations. New capital flowing into the carrier market is creating competition and that's genuinely good for buyers. But a broker who just chases the lowest number isn't doing the job. In a soft market, what gets carved out of coverage to get that number matters just as much as the number itself.

Read the full article here.

If any of this connects to something you're working through at renewal, I'm happy to talk through it.