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Insurance
Directors' and Officers' Insurance
Being elected to serve on the board of your co-op or condo can be viewed as a great honor or a dreadful Read More
The Value of Homeowners Insurance
For many people, their home is their greatest asset. Yet studies show that 59 percent of today’s homes are underinsured by an average of 22 percent. To protect their investment this hurricane season, homeowners should update their insurance regularly to include improvements, major purchases and increased rebuilding costs, according to the Insurance Information Institute (III). Read More
The Course of a Claim
Any number of things can set off an insurance claim in a co-op or condo building. Someone can slip and fall in the lobby; there can be aesthetic damage from a construction project, or a leaky roof can cause major water damage— sometimes in multiple units. And while most building managers might understand the basics for filing a claim, the road it travels from the initial contact with the insurance company to a compensation check appearing in the mail can be a long one. Read More
Deconstructing Insurance
Insurance sounds like a simple concept: you pay a premium to your insurer, and then when you file a claim, your insurer pays you. Simple. Insuring a co-op or condo building shouldn’t be much different than insuring yourself—just on a bigger scale, right? Read More
How Safe Are You?
Since they were first built, apartment buildings have been insured for disasters and unforeseen circumstances—the things nobody ever wants to happen, but has to admit are possible. Things like fires, floods, earthquakes and so on. In the past, terrorism was thought of as being something that happened in other countries, but since 9/11, the fear of terrorism—and the desire to make sure one’s home is safe from it as much as possible—have taken center stage in the minds of many New Yorkers. Read More
Insurance Products
Having insurance means having financial protection—protection from being financially crippled by having to pay excessive costs to rebuild a life or a home—or a whole building—when tragedy strikes. Read More
Pure Premium
In 2001, the Amalgamated Houses co-op in the Bronx paid $287,000 in insurance premiums. The following June, when the existing policy terminated, the yearly tab rose to a staggering $427,000—an increase of almost 50 percent. And wasn’t just the Amalgamated Houses whose insurance costs skyrocketed. All across the city, in buildings both commercial and residential, premiums rose markedly. Read More
Limiting D&O Exposure
It’s important for cooperative corporations to have enough insurance to cover any unexpected problems that may arise, and one of the most crucial policies in any corporation’s insurance portfolio is directors and officers insurance, more commonly known as “D&O.” While a general insurance policy protects damage to property, D&O insurance is designed to protect individual board members from having to pay out-of-pocket for damages awarded in lawsuits against the board. Read More
Specialty Insurance
When it comes to insuring a co-op or condominium community, a belt-and-suspenders philosophy could prove the safest – and perhaps, most advantageous – choice. Getting that extra coverage means going beyond the basics of property and liability insurance and venturing into the realm of specialty coverage. Read More
Directors & Officers Liability
Do you sit on the board of your condo or co-op? If you do, are you sure that you and your personal assets are adequately protected when the board of directors and the association are sued? Read More
Risk Purchasing Groups
There is power in numbers, as the old saying goes - and that goes double for co-ops and condo buildings that are pooling their collective resources to reduce insurance costs under an umbrella known as a Risk Purchasing Group. Read More
The Earliest Apartments
The earliest apartments in New York City contained most of the elements of a private house, though often assembled in a manner far from functional. Service spaces in particular were seldom arranged or designed to save the time and energy of those who regularly used them. But with household help cheap and easy to obtain, and wives who spent most of their time at home, most men were blissfully ignorant of these inadequacies. Read More
Caution--Wet Floor
For building boards, management companies, shareholders, and unit owners, the issue of insurance often becomes complicated: how much insurance - and of what kind - does one's building, or even a shareholder/tenant, need? Is there such a thing as too much coverage? How does a board know if they're adequately insured? And, more importantly, what does that policy protect, or not protect? Then there's the issue of liability within the home, and whose insurance company is responsible. Read More
Creating Your Insurance Profile
A lot of factors go into determining the extent and cost of a building's insurance coverage: replacement cost, location, number of units, and claims history top of the list, but on closer inspection, there are plenty of ways to better position your building to qualify for lower premiums - and avoid some of the pitfalls of shopping for insurance. Read More
Vive La Difference
If an electrical fire destroys your newly renovated kitchen, will your co-op pay to replace your space-age stove and slate countertops? If a pipe bursts in your condo and your $10,000 wallpaper is ruined, who pays to fix it? The answers to questions like these may lie in your building's underlying documents and should be considered when buildings and individual unit owners are purchasing insurance. Read More
The Issue of Coverage
After the terror attacks of 2001, many co-op and condo buildings in the New York area got another nasty shock: insurance premiums suddenly spiraled upward as much as 50 percent or more in the space of one or two billing periods. Some buildings were simply dumped by their insurers with little explanation or opportunity for recourse. Read More
Guarding Home and Hearth
You live in a doorman building on the Upper East Side - your building has a health club, a concierge, and an attentive board/management team that keeps everything running smoothly, 24/7. With what you're paying in monthly maintenance, you figure all the new fixtures and valuable possessions in your apartment are covered by the building's insurance policy, right? If a pipe breaks in your bathroom and floods the apartment downstairs, it's the co-op's responsibility to repair the damage, right? Your board would tell you if you needed extra coverage, right? Read More
Keeping It Covered
The ads fill the television airwaves each day. Dozens of lawyers encouraging injured parties to sue and collect their claims. It's there on the street, too; every time someone slips or falls in front of a building, there's that look of panic on a property owner's face. When a pipe bursts or wiring goes bad, the first instinct may no longer be to fix the problem, but rather to wonder whose policy will cover the repairs. Read More
Protecting Home and Hearth
It's every homeowner's worst nightmare: you come home from work to find your apartment flooded, or your building smoldering from a kitchen fire that got out of control. After the initial trauma, there could be worse shocks in store if you're not properly insured. Read More
Covering All the Bases
Accidents happen. Things go wrong. It's a simple fact of life. And sometimes the only course of action is simply to protect against the consequences. Liability insurance takes the sting out of the unknown, creating a safety net for those worrisome moments. Read More
Bracing for the Worst
Before last September, chances are that most people didn't give much thought to whether acts of terrorism were covered by their homeowner's insurance. Co-op boards and condo associations were more concerned with whether their "all-risk" policy covered damage from water seepage and other chronic ills than from malicious, catastrophic damage. Since that fateful day when terrorist-flown airplanes brought down landmark commercial buildings and caused millions of dollars in damage to the surrounding residential properties in Lower Manhattan, the insurance industry has undergone tremendous changes. Although most New York City residents doubt that they will be the victims of a terrorist act, insurers and lenders have to picture a worst-case scenario. Read More
Minimize Renovation RIsk
As construction insurance has evolved into a highly specialized and complex field over the past few decades, effective management of risk and insurance is critical when undertaking a construction project. Unfortunately, there is still no single-solution policy for owners to adopt for their construction projects. Instead, owners must carefully choose from a basket of policies that are then fine-tuned to cover the particularities and needs of the owners’ insurable risks. Read More
Better Safe than Sorry
By definition, insurance doesn’t fit into the mold of predictability. It’s something we buy, but hope we’ll never need. With some 30,000 structural fires taking place in New York City last year, it’s clear that the unexpected can and does happen-and it’s easy to see the importance of properly insuring against potential tragedies. Read More
Directors and Officers
The eccentric widow who lives in apartment 3F with her 16 cats claims that undue noise from the musicians in 3G caused her to have a nervous breakdown-and you, the board president, are to blame because the wall between the apartments-two feet of solid concrete-is too thin. She then sues you for half a million bucks in compensatory and punitive damages. Read More
Are Rock-Bottom Rates a Thing of the Past?
The 1990s were good times for those paying insurance premiums. "We had almost a decade of severe, severe cost cutting," says Coletta Kemper, vice president of industry affairs for the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers. "They were about as low as anybody could probably take them, and the industry had been suffering underwriting losses for many years." Read More
Necessity or Luxury?
One might assume that the insurance policies carried by a building would cover any mishaps that would affect residents. This, however, is a misconception. A co-op corporation or condo association takes responsibility for the structural aspects of the building. They are also responsible for the common areas of the building, including the lobby, hallways, stairs, elevators, and other areas shared by the building’s occupants. However, "every [co-op or condo] owner needs to have their own insurance," states David L. Mittleman, a principal at The Oberman Companies, an insurance brokerage firm in White Plains, New York. An apartment dweller needs insurance as much as any homeowner. Read More
Don't Learn the Hard Way
Insurance is always a "hot-button" topic among co-op corporations and condo association boards. Since insurance is an annual expense that is not mandated by a union contract or a city tax assessment, many boards regularly "shop" their coverage to lower a controllable expense. Yet, insurance often represents only a very small percentage of a building’s operating costs. Thus, boards could be found negligent if they fail to have adequate coverage to meet an emergency. [Such a negligence claim would be covered by Directors and Officers (D&O) insurance, incidentally.] Read More
Risk Purchasing Groups
In August 1986, a Time magazine cover proclaimed America, Your Insurance Has Been Read More
Recovering Fraud Loss
There is some good news for cooperatives and condo-miniums that feel they have suffered because of the Read More
