Although we have seen a change of government in 2010 in the UK, we are still, in many areas, suffering from the effects of the worldwide recession and certain actions of local authorities.
Over the past fifteen years, local authority planners appear to have chosen a deliberate path of approving every single out of town shopping centre or supermarket application that fell anywhere near their desks. Of course they never thought about the ultimate consequences which are, in many places, small high streets full of empty shops.
Hopefully things will change and some form of regeneration programme will be undertaken to make more use of these high street premises. We are finding many are being re-let as office premises, lets hope the trend continues.
As a result of these empty locations, there are many more landlords looking for unoccupied building insurance. Insurers do not and never will, like to insure unoccupied commercial building insurance policies.
As a property owner, you may think it is the best risk in the world because it is empty. But, an insurers sees things differently based on their past insurance. Empty buildings unfortunately attract trouble, whether this is smashed windows or people breaking in to steal all the copper pipes, whichever way you look at it, there are few insurers that actually, long term, make money from theses policies.
As a result, you may find the insurer that was quite cheap to insure your building one year, is looking for a sky high increase the next. If this does happen, then do not sit back and accept whatever your broker tells you that no-one else wants to underwrite the cover. If you have had an unreasonable increase and the risk is claims free, then you need to appoint a different business insurance broker to scour the market on your behalf. Whilst we do not offer guarantees, we can be fairly certain that you will get a better price for comparable cover.