Before I quote a single line for a business, I ask for the lease. Not a summary of it — the actual insurance section.
Why does the lease matter more than the quote?
Almost every commercial program I place is shaped by a document the client signed months earlier. The lease, the vendor agreement or the customer contract sets the limits, the coverages and the parties who have to appear on the policy.
I have seen businesses carry coverage for years that quietly failed their own lease. Nobody notices until a landlord's compliance service rejects the certificate, or worse, until there is a claim and the indemnity language does not match what the policy actually does.
It also protects you commercially. Knowing what the lease obliges you to carry lets you price the tenancy properly before you sign it, rather than discovering the cost of compliance in your first renewal cycle.
What am I looking for in it?
The required limits for each line. Whether the umbrella has to sit over all coverages or only over the premises liability. Whether business income has to be carried at a multiple of rent — two times annual rent is a requirement I see regularly. Whether property must be written on a special form. Whether replacement cost is specified. And exactly who must be named, and how.
Those details are not interchangeable. A requirement to name a landlord as an additional insured is a very different instruction from naming them as an additional named insured, and the difference is not cosmetic.
What if the requirement seems unreasonable?
Then we say so before we buy anything. Sometimes the right first step is to ask the counterparty to waive or reduce a requirement rather than to purchase limit you do not need. I have had five-million-dollar requirements applied to small tenancies where the number came from a template, not from the risk. It is always worth asking.
What I recommend
- Send me the insurance section of the lease or contract in full, not a summary or a screenshot.
- Send it before you renew, not after the certificate is rejected.
- Ask the counterparty to confirm in writing whether the umbrella must sit over every underlying policy or only over premises liability.
- Where a requirement looks disproportionate to the exposure, let me ask for a waiver before we price the extra limit.
The short version
Your insurance obligations were set the day you signed the lease. I would rather read that document first and build a program that satisfies it than sell you a policy and discover the gap at renewal.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at any time.
