What Is Commercial Property Insurance?

Commercial property insurance is an essential coverage for business owners, especially when running a home-based business. It helps protect the owned or rented property that you use to operate your business, such as your:

• Building
• Equipment
• Tools
• Inventory
• Furniture
• Personal property

For home-based business owners, this type of commercial insurance provides more coverage than homeowners insurance. You may have heard other names for this type of insurance, including:

• Commercial building insurance
• Business personal property insurance
• Commercial real estate insurance
• Non-residential building insurance

What Does Commercial Building Insurance Cover?

Commercial building insurance helps protect your business’ physical assets, like your owned or rented building and the equipment you use to operate your company. It can help your business if:

• A fire damages or destroys your computers
• Lightning strikes the building that you have business renters insurance on
• Someone breaks into your building and steals your inventory

It can also help protect business assets, like income, because it includes business interruption coverage. If you can’t open because of covered property damage, this coverage can help replace lost income.

We know every business has unique needs. That’s why we’ve made it easy for you to customize your commercial property insurance policy. You can add more protection for things like valuable papers and records, which can help cover your costs to:

• Reproduce important documents
• Provide temporary storage
• Move records to avoid a loss

What Doesn’t Commercial Property Insurance Cover?

Be aware that your commercial property insurance policy doesn’t cover every type of property damage. This coverage can’t help your business if:

• Your customer drops their laptop when they trip over a box in your office
• One of your employees puts a hole in your client’s wall
• You get into an accident while making a delivery to a customer and damage your vehicle
• A nearby brook overflows after a heavy rainfall causes flooding near your building and damages your inventory
• You or your employees intentionally damage property
• You can get other types of commercial insurance to give your business comprehensive coverage that can help cover these kinds of claims.

Bundle Commercial Property Insurance With Essential Coverage Through a Business Owner’s Policy (BOP)

You can get commercial property coverage as a standalone policy. But many small businesses choose to get a Business Owner’s Policy (BOP), which combines three essential coverages into one:

• Commercial property insurance, explained throughout this page.
• General liability insurance to help cover claims that your business caused bodily injury or property damage to someone else.
• Business income insurance, or business interruption insurance, to help replace your lost income if you can’t open because of covered property damage.
• Get a commercial property insurance quote to find out how this coverage or a BOP can help your business.

Learn How To Reduce Your Risk Exposure

There are steps you can take to help reduce your company’s risk exposures. For example, you can create a plan to regularly examine and test your company’s alarm and sprinkler systems in your building or home office. This gives you an opportunity to fix any issues and make sure you’re prepared for a disaster.

Bigger companies that need large business property insurance can work with our risk engineering consultants to:

• Create a safe work environment
• Help reduce loss
• Improve operations