With the Board’s permission/ invitation, we will be available to visit the Association at least once each year to walk the property, evaluate and discuss current and evolving coverage needs and recommendations, and meet with the Board personally. We are available and happy to attend additional Board (and/or annual) meetings or owners’ forums throughout the year on an as-needed/ as-requested basis.

Both initially and in the future, we will conduct a detailed review of all of the Association’s insurance policies to assess how/ whether they comply both with statutory provisions and the insurance requirements set forth in your governing documents, as well as how they compare with both industry-standard and best practices recommendations.

We are committed to completing an exhaustive survey of the earthquake marketplace each and every year, to ensure that we are proposing the broadest terms and best pricing for the Board’s consideration at each renewal. We are always happy to share a detailed Marketing Report with you at that time, illustrating the facilities we approached on your behalf, together with their feedback.

With regard to your master insurance, we will explore all of our available options (for your Property, General Liability, Commercial Auto, Fidelity/ Crime, D&O Liability, Commercial Umbrella and Workers Comp policies) at the time of our inagural marketing effort (that is, the first year we write your coverage), and then we will seek to maintain longer-term relationships* with those carriers – contingent, of course, upon their continued ability to offer fair and competitive terms at future renewals. Certainly in the event of a material change in your risk profile, an undue premium increase, or other adverse development, we would conduct an exhaustive marketing effort at that time, as warranted!

*Provided that the incumbent carriers continue to offer reasonable renewal terms, we do not habitually shop all of these policies annually, as we do with the earthquake coverage. This is because shopping and moving these other lines of coverage too frequently can actually be counter-productive – underwriters can tire of seeing the same account every year and be less motivated to offer their best terms (especially if they feel they’ll just be shopped again next year), and in the event of a claim, it can disproportionately inflate the Association’s loss ratio if you don’t have a few additional, claims-free years with that same insurer to off-set the loss.  This makes the account appear less profitable than it actually is and can expose the Association to more extreme rate fluctuations or even a non-renewal.  So, while we will always review the renewal premium and will certainly shop the coverage in the event of an excessive increase, or if we believe we have a superior market or product available, we do not unilaterally shop these policies every year.  This said, even in the absence of a premium increase or obvious favorable alternative, we do still tend to shop the master insurance at least every 4-5 years, to ensure that the incumbent insurers remain the best fit.

We will always aim to provide you with renewal terms at least 30 days prior to your renewal date, and if the Board has a meeting scheduled slightly prior to that 30-day mark, you need only alert us of your deadline, and we will do everything within our power to meet it!

Once the Board authorizes renewal through our office, we will provide billing information and updated certificates of insurance (often within 24-72 hours on business days). We are also happy to prepare and forward an annual insurance disclosure summary (to be included in annual budget mailings).

Upon receipt of the Association’s policies, we will review them for accuracy to ensure that the Association name, mailing and physical addresses, effective dates, limits, deductibles and endorsements have all been issued correctly/ in keeping with what we outlined in our renewal proposal.

Our dedicated full-time, in-house claims specialist Tony Menke, CPCU®, is available to you for support at any time throughout the claims process, along with additional support staff as needed. Upon notification of a claim, our agency will submit the details to the appropriate carrier(s), ensure that an adjuster is assigned promptly, and will liaise with the carrier on your behalf as needed. If you encounter any response or other service issues, you need only advise us, and we will get involved immediately. In the event of a large claim, Tony (often with Tim Cline as well) will visit the property personally to discuss the situation and review the claims process with you.

As you know, our agency insures common interest developments exclusively – we do NOT write any personal lines insurance. This said, we are always happy to draft letters, answer phone calls, or host seminars/ Q&A’s at your location, to help educate individual homeowners about the coverage they can (and should!) maintain personally, to supplement the Association’s insurance. As a disinterested party in that transaction, we can even speak with their personal insurance agents about the coverage the HOA maintains and what we suggest each unit owner purchase to “dovetail” that protection. We’ve even produced some informative videos on this topic:

With regard to certificates of insurance, we have a dedicated full-time customer service specialist handling these requests personally (as opposed to a faceless website), and these documents are frequently issued “same day” – and always at no cost to the individual unit owner. (Last-minute “RUSH” requests made by escrow officers or lenders may be subject to an expedition fee, but this will always be disclosed and agreed upon in advance.)

As we say, we offer premium service, with no added premium!  We hope that you find this will reflect your experience.

Our agency does NOT believe in charging undue broker fees (or in allowing our wholesale partners to do so). For new clients appointing our Agency as Broker of Record for the first time, we will waive ALL retail broker fees and negotiate waivers (or, at the very least, reductions) of all wholesale broker fees to the extent possible. Furthermore, our agency will NEVER “add points” to a third party’s finance agreement to profit from your choosing to finance a policy. Occasionally, if we are quoting a renewal at a substantial savings, we will add a broker fee to supplement our reduced commissions on the lower-priced policy – in these situations (and in any situation in which we or our wholesale partner applies a broker fee), these fees will be clearly disclosed as a separate line item in our proposal, and we will readily provide an explanation to you of any fee, at any time.

We’re here for you – we know that you are all volunteers, and that serving on a community association Board can, at times, be a thankless job – so we are truly passionate about doing all we can to make the insurance piece easier on you! We have access to numerous articles, videos, anecdotes, checklists, referrals and other resources that we are happy to share. Whether it’s reviewing the Insurance Section of your draft CC&R restatement or recommending what insurance you should require from an independent contractor, we’re happy to help. We won’t always be able to answer every question (there will likely be occasions that we will have to defer to your legal counsel, for example), but we will always endeavor to assist to the best of our ability.

We are dedicated to surpassing your expectations by providing extraordinary service through honesty, courtesy, professionalism and education.

We place an extremely high value on ethics and transparency, and we take our call to act in “utmost good faith” very seriously. Doing right by our clients, carrier partners, and employees is paramount for us, even if it means giving up a piece of business that we would otherwise very much like to write. If we review a competitor’s offer for one of our clients and find we cannot improve upon it, we will not hesitate to tell them so.