Habitational & Multifamily — Texas
Confiance is an independent agency placing property, liability and umbrella coverage for apartment owners, property managers and lenders across Texas. Twenty years of habitational underwriting, and direct access to the wholesale markets that actually write this class.
An apartment program is more than a property policy. Here is what we place, and what each line is actually protecting you from.
Buildings, plus the structures owners forget at valuation time: carports, mailrooms, pool enclosures, perimeter fencing, signage. Limit adequacy is where most apartment programs quietly fail.
Slip-and-falls, dog bites, assault and battery allegations, habitability claims. Habitational GL exclusions vary more between carriers than owners expect — they are worth reading side by side.
Pays the rent you would have collected while units are unrentable after a covered loss. The period-of-restoration wording matters more here than the limit does.
Lenders and institutional tenants frequently require it, and habitational umbrella capacity has tightened. Better structured at renewal planning than at closing.
Pays to bring the undamaged portion of a building up to current code after a loss. On a property built under an earlier code cycle, this is the gap that turns a covered loss into an uncovered rebuild.
Boilers, chillers, elevators, electrical panels. Standard property forms do not cover mechanical or electrical failure — only the damage that follows it.
NFIP or private market. Zone X does not mean no flood risk; a substantial share of Texas flood claims originate outside mapped floodplains.
Including TWIA where the property sits in the designated coastal counties. Percentage deductibles and named-storm triggers should be modeled before binding, not discovered after.
Ground-up construction, gut renovations and value-add repositioning. Soft costs and delay-in-opening coverage are where these policies usually run thin.
On-site maintenance, groundskeeping and leasing staff. Texas is unusual in making comp elective — opting out has liability consequences worth talking through.
Resident PII, online payment portals and property-management platforms. A leasing office holds far more sensitive data than most owners account for.
For HOA and condominium association boards, covering decisions made in a volunteer capacity.
Portfolio owners
If you hold more than a handful of properties, the structural question is scheduled limits versus blanket, and whether consolidating onto a master program earns better terms than the sum of the individual policies does. We work at portfolio level: one renewal calendar, one point of contact, one comparison you can actually read across.
Property managers
You need certificates, endorsements and renewal documents faster than most agencies produce them. You get a named contact who knows the portfolio without being re-briefed, and a renewal calendar built backward from your reporting dates.
Lenders and servicers
We produce evidence of property insurance to your specifications — the right ACORD form, the right mortgagee and loss-payee language, limits checked against the loan documents — ahead of your closing date rather than after your third follow-up. If a borrower’s coverage does not satisfy your requirements, you get it in writing: what is missing, and what it costs to fix.
Referral partners
Send us a property and you get a market strategy back, along with a straight answer on whether it is placeable and roughly where it prices. We do not cross-sell your client and we do not go around you.
Underwriters price apartment risk on a short list of specifics. Most of them are knowable before you go to market, and several of them are fixable.
Two exterior finishes that look nearly identical from the parking lot and price very differently. EIFS — synthetic stucco — carries a claims history around moisture intrusion behind the cladding, and many carriers respond by declining the risk, excluding related damage, or surcharging heavily. Traditional three-coat stucco over lath usually does not draw the same treatment.
If your submission says stucco and the property turns out to be EIFS, the quote changes after inspection. Knowing which you have, and being able to document it, is work worth doing before you go to market rather than during.
Roof age has become the most common single reason a habitational property in Texas gets declined or repriced. Past a certain age — the threshold varies by carrier and roof type — you start seeing actual cash value endorsements replacing replacement cost, cosmetic damage exclusions, or a separate roof deductible.
The gap between an RCV and an ACV roof on a 200-unit property after a hailstorm is not a rounding error. If you are within a couple of years of a roof replacement, the timing of that capital project and the timing of your renewal are the same conversation.
Underwriters want five years of currently-valued loss runs, and they read frequency very differently from severity. Several small claims often price worse than one large one, because frequency reads as a management problem rather than an event.
If you have had a bad stretch, the productive move is documenting what changed — the mitigation, the vendor, the capital project, the date — rather than hoping it passes unremarked. It rarely does.
Most Texas habitational property carries a percentage deductible for wind and hail rather than a flat dollar figure, and the percentage applies to the insured value, not to the size of the loss. On a $20 million schedule, a 2% wind deductible is $400,000 out of pocket before the policy responds at all. Coastal properties add a separate named-storm trigger on top.
These should be modeled against your actual reserves before binding. The premium saving from accepting a higher percentage is real — so is the exposure, and only one of the two shows up on the proposal.
A coinsurance clause requires you to insure to a stated percentage of replacement cost, typically 80, 90 or 100%. Insure for less and the carrier reduces every claim payment proportionally — partial losses included, which is where owners are caught out.
Construction costs have moved enough in recent years that limits set five years ago are frequently short today, which means a property can drift into a coinsurance penalty without anyone changing anything. A current replacement cost valuation is worth more than a confident estimate, and an agreed value endorsement removes the penalty entirely where a carrier will offer it.
Distance to a responding fire station and to a creditable water supply drives the property rate directly. Two otherwise identical properties — one in an urban protection class, one at the edge of a service area — can price meaningfully apart on that factor alone. It is not something you can change, but it does explain gaps you might otherwise read as a carrier being unreasonable.
We don’t blanket the market. Duplicate submissions on the same property block each other and signal a distressed account to underwriters who talk to one another.Luis Marin — President, Confiance LLC
Both evidence property insurance. The 27 is the older form and a great many lenders no longer accept it; the 28 carries more coverage detail and is what most current loan documents specify by name. Sending the wrong one costs a round trip, and occasionally a closing day. We issue whichever your documents call for.
A mortgagee clause gives the lender rights under the policy that survive certain acts of the insured, including advance notice of cancellation, and it is what most real property loans require. A loss payee holds a weaker position and is usually the right endorsement for equipment or personal property instead. This one gets confused often, and the confusion only becomes visible at claim time.
Standing certificate holder lists, reissue at renewal so your holders never lapse, and a named person to call when something needs to move today.
Five years of currently-valued loss runs, a current schedule of values with construction type, year built, square footage and roof age by building, your current declarations pages, and your renewal date. If you do not have a clean SOV, we will build one with you — it is the single document that most determines the quality of the quotes you get back.
We decide which carriers and wholesalers see the risk, and in what order. Concentrated, well-prepared submissions get better terms than scattered ones.
A written proposal: executive summary, coverage highlights, a genuine side-by-side of the options, premium and deductible summary, carrier notes, the exclusions worth knowing about, and our recommendation with the reasoning behind it.
Binding instructions, certificates and evidence issued to your lender and holders, and a renewal calendar that opens 120 days out rather than 30. Most unpleasant renewal surprises are just late starts.
We are independent, which means we are not working within one carrier’s appetite and calling it a market survey. We concentrate volume with a small number of wholesalers per line rather than spreading submissions across a dozen relationships — that concentration buys our clients faster service and more underwriter attention on difficult placements.
Market availability, wind and hail treatment, and named-storm requirements change materially between Central Texas and the coast. A property that places easily in Austin can be a genuinely difficult submission two hundred miles southeast. Knowing which markets will look at which geography is most of the job.
There is no useful average, because the range is enormous. Premium is driven by construction type, roof age, location and wind exposure, loss history, total insured value, and the deductible structure you accept. A wood-frame property in a coastal county and a masonry property in Austin with a new roof can differ by a multiple, not a percentage. The honest answer is that a current schedule of values and five years of loss runs will get you a real number within days.
Typically property coverage at replacement cost with the lender named as mortgagee, general liability at a specified limit, loss of rents, and flood coverage where the property sits in a mapped flood zone. Agency and CMBS lenders often add requirements around wind deductibles, carrier financial ratings, and named-storm limits. Send us the insurance section of your loan documents and we will tell you what your current program is missing.
Usually some combination of four things: reconstruction costs rising, which raises the insured value the rate applies to; your roof crossing a carrier’s age threshold; claims in the last five years; and general market conditions for Texas habitational property, which have been difficult. The first two are addressable with planning. The others are worth remarketing against.
Most habitational property policies apply a percentage deductible to wind and hail rather than a flat amount, and the percentage is calculated on the insured value of the affected property, not on the size of the claim. A 2% deductible on a $20 million schedule means $400,000 before the policy pays. Coastal properties often carry a separate, higher named-storm deductible triggered by declared events.
Significantly, and increasingly. Older roofs draw actual cash value settlement instead of replacement cost, cosmetic damage exclusions, higher roof-specific deductibles, or outright declination. Carriers set their own thresholds and they have been tightening. Documented roof replacements, with dates and materials, are among the most valuable things you can bring to a submission.
Coinsurance requires you to carry a limit equal to a stated percentage of replacement cost — usually 80, 90 or 100%. If you carry less, the insurer reduces every claim payment by the same proportion you were short, including on partial losses. You avoid it by keeping valuations current, or by obtaining an agreed value endorsement that waives the clause where a carrier will write one.
Your lender will require it if the property sits in a Special Flood Hazard Area. Outside those zones it is optional and frequently worth buying anyway — a meaningful share of Texas flood losses occur outside mapped floodplains, and standard property policies exclude flood entirely. Private market flood often outperforms NFIP on limits and on business income for larger schedules.
No. Your property policy covers the building and your business personal property; a resident’s furniture, electronics and clothing are their own responsibility. This is the argument for requiring renters insurance in your lease, which also reduces liability claims against you when a resident’s loss has no other source of recovery.
Yes. Portfolios can be written on a scheduled basis, listing each property with its own limits, or with blanket limits across the schedule. Blanket limits give you flexibility when one property is underinsured relative to another; scheduled limits are sometimes cheaper and easier to place. Which is right depends on the spread of values and how confident you are in the valuations, and it is worth modeling rather than defaulting.
Habitational is the industry’s term for property occupied as residences — apartments, condominiums, student housing, senior living and similar. It is treated as its own underwriting class because the liability exposure differs from other commercial property: more people, more foot traffic, more tenant-related claims. Carriers maintain distinct appetites for it, and many commercial carriers decline it entirely.
A schedule of values with construction, year built, square footage and roof age by building; five years of currently-valued loss runs; your current declarations pages; and your renewal date. If any of that is incomplete we can work with what you have and help you build the rest — a thin submission simply produces conservative quotes.
Tell us about the property and we will come back with a straight assessment: whether your current program has gaps, where it is likely mispriced, and what the market would do with it today. No obligation, and no sales sequence — a real answer, or a referral to someone better placed.
Prefer to talk? 210-915-7839
Or email marinl@confianceinsurance.net
