How do you track tenant insurance policies?

Question

Hello All,

I'm a small bay flex industrial owner operator. I'm looking for solutions on how to effectively track COI's for tenant liability policies. We have clauses in our lease that require it upon execution of the lease. We also require being added as additionally insured on the policies. But what happens is that a year or two goes by and we don't have updated COIs.

Does anyone have any digital solutions for automatically tracking these COI's at scale? We of course could build an internal manual process with a virtual assistant of some sort, but I want to see if anything exists. I have seen digital solutions for Multi family and residential real estate, but not Commercial General Liability.

Thanks for the help!

Ronald Rohde · Answer

Excel spreadsheet? How many tenants do you have?

I self manage my stuff, but its not hard to do it for 50-60 tenants...

Aj Bellamah · Answer

Hey Ronald, thanks for the response. We have over 200 tenants with different COI requirements. Not massive and we CAN do it via excel or custom fields in Rent Manager. But through experience, some tend to slip through the cracks as everyone's insurance requirements and anniversary  dates vary across the portfolio.

Just wanted to know if anyone had a non excel sheet based automated solution for collecting and maintaining COIs. "Trust Layer" might but I think its more for subcontractor COI tracking. Anyway, I appreciate the feedback!

Michael Smythe · Answer

@Aj Bellamah does Rent Manager allow custom fields and reports?

You could create a custom field to track Due Date and then setup a report to auto-run monthly, sorted by Due Date.

Jeff S. · Answer

It’s worse, @Aj Bellamah.  There are more issues and you’re only addressing the easy one.

You, or a VA, can schedule a call to your tenant to remind them and find out if they intend to re-sign with their current insurance company or shop and go with another.  Then, call the company a month later to confirm and get a copy of the policy or EOI.  A PITA to be sure but this doesn’t address all the possibilities.

What if your tenant pays by the month? Practically, how do you check then?  Legislate pre-paid annual policies only?

Even with a one-year policy, your tenant or the insurance company can cancel anytime and you might not find out for months.  We were recently notified by an insurance company that they canceled a borrower’s policy four months earlier. Four months!!!

Some, but not all policies include a 30 notice.  You can require a 438 BFU endorsement, which is similar.

We don’t have a great answer and many we know have similar concerns.  A software solution would be ideal, but insurance policies don’t seem to be consistently listed anywhere.  I know someone looking into Nexus Lexus but with no solution yet.

FCI, is a loan servicer that works with a local insurance broker and says they will notify you quickly if any policy is canceled (???).  The broker does this for free because they get to supply the resulting force-placed policy.  This doesn’t help you, but the question is how do they do it?   The answer could help you.   I see the need and a good business if anyone is ambitious.  Very frustrating.

Henry Clark · Answer

OP.  With that many properties.  Check your Property Management or Preventive Maintenance software out.  Just add it as an item that comes up.  If you don't have those, the COI is small change.

Kristi Kandel · Answer

@Aj Bellamah Unless you get a very robust system you are left with manually tracking OR customizing your own CRM. My companies use Wrike and we custom built out our projects and tasks to meet each company's needs. That allows us to have dashboards and when a task shows up it needs started that day. Whether it's checking the permit status at the AHJ, notifying us to send an annual rent increase notice, collecting tenant insurance, etc. You can start small/MVP/proof of concept and build out the system as you go using Wrike, Monday.com, Asana, etc. It was a game changer for our company and is incredibly robust now.

How do you track tenant insurance policies?

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