Two rivers meet at the edge of downtown Des Moines, and the storm systems that fill them arrive again later in the year as wind. An underwriter reading a building here is working out which of those mechanisms your address is actually exposed to, how much of your rentable space sits below grade, and what happens to the file when a floor goes quiet between leases.
Nate Jones is a CPCU-designated insurance broker and the founder of Wexford Insurance, LLC and Lessors Risk Guard Insurance. He places lessors risk and
commercial property coverage for owners who lease buildings to commercial tenants,
through a specialty panel writing in 48 states.
Reach him through the quote form or call 317-942-0549.
Last updated · Reviewed by Nate Jones, CPCU
The building stock
Downtown masonry and mid-rise office stock linked by skywalks, with brick warehouse buildings in the East Village and river districts.
Compact downtown core with suburban office campuses and arterial retail corridors reaching into surrounding suburbs.
What the weather and the ground do here
Severe convective storms, hail, tornado and derecho wind exposure, with river flooding along the Des Moines and Raccoon.
The useful thing to take from that is how little the two failure modes have in common. Water arrives slowly and from underneath, and it reaches whatever you put below the sidewalk — mechanical rooms, storage, the tenant who took the cheap space downstairs. Wind arrives in minutes and from above, and it reaches the parapet, the membrane and the rooftop equipment in one pass. An old brick block by the river and a leased office plate in the core answer those questions very differently, and an owner holding both answers them on the same afternoon.
A paired two-column panel for Des Moines. The left column lists conditions that come with owning commercial property in this city: rentable space below grade near the river confluence, a straight-line wind event that loads an entire roof at once, hail on a low-slope membrane, a converted warehouse floor sitting between leases, and a skywalk connection into a building somebody else owns. The right column gives the insurance answer that meets each one in turn. A footnote records that water and wind are answered by separate placements.
The condition on the ground here
The insurance answer
Rentable space below grade near the confluence
Flood placed separately from the property form
A straight-line wind event over the whole roof
Roof, parapet and rooftop equipment values
Hail on a low-slope membrane
Wind and hail deductible terms and the valuation basis
A rehabbed warehouse floor between leases
The registration duty and the policy vacancy condition
A skywalk into a building you do not own
Premises liability where the public route crosses
Water and wind are different mechanisms, answered separately.
Des Moines: what the rivers, the sky and the lease put on a building.
The local law that binds you
Des Moines treats an empty building as a status worth recording rather than a private matter between an owner and a broker. Plan around it, because the same emptiness the city takes an interest in is what your property policy reacts to, and the two run on separate tracks — satisfying the city does nothing for the policy. The ordinary case is the one that catches people: a suite sitting while you look for the next tenant, a rehab running long, a foreclosure moving through the courts. Read what follows as the version of your building that someone other than you can look up.
Registration of Vacant Structure / Vacant Property registry business license
Sec. 61-70. Registration of Vacant Structure. For so long as the property remains vacant, or subject to a Notice of Lis Pendens or a Foreclosure action, a registration fee shall be due from the Owner or Authorized Management Agent, as applicable under the circumstances, each year not later than the fifteenth day of the month following the month in which the original registration was made. ... Operation of a Vacant Property without a Vacant Property registry business license may be prosecuted as a municipal infraction.
The Owner or Authorized Management Agent shall secure vacant Structures subject to this article, so they are not accessible to unauthorized persons. Broken and/or boarded windows shall be secured with glass by replacement or repair and reglazing. Boarded up, broken doors or other entry points shall be repaired in a Workmanlike manner.
Iowa’s half of this has nothing to do with how you maintain the building. It is about what your policy is still doing once the space is empty, and it does not wait for you to decide anything. In a downtown where a converted warehouse floor or an office suite turns over on an ordinary schedule, that condition gets reached quietly — a lease simply ends. The awkward case here is the partly-let building, where an owner reasonably thinks of the property as occupied while one specific space is not.
Iowa prints a vacancy provision in its own code, and it runs on the
building’s occupancy rather than on your conduct.
The statute and the exact words where there are any, together with whatever the
research recorded, are on the
Iowa page.
By what you own in Des Moines
Des Moines holds all three of these in different geographies: retail strung along the arterial corridors and folded into converted ground floors, office split between the core and the campuses outside it, and mixed-use buildings where a rehabilitated warehouse carries a habitational component above commercial space. Each page below takes one of them and follows it through.
Underneath the rivers and the wind, these are the same lines doing the same jobs they do anywhere. Here is what each one is for, described with Des Moines taken back out of it:
My building is behind a levee. Do I still need flood coverage in Des Moines?
Being behind a levee is a reason to ask the question carefully, not a reason to skip it. Levee protection is an engineering status that gets reviewed, and the mapping that follows from it can change while your building stands still. The other reason is what sits below grade downtown: basement tenant space and mechanical rooms take water long before a main floor does. A property form does not answer for flood at all, so it is a separate placement or it is nothing.
Is wind here the same underwriting problem as a tornado?
No, and the difference is geometry. A tornado is a narrow track that flattens one address and misses the next. The event central Iowa is better known for runs in a straight line for hours, so a single pass loads every parapet, every low-slope roof and every rooftop unit you own across the metro at the same moment. An owner with buildings along one corridor gets a single loss with many locations attached rather than one bad location.
My lease makes the tenant responsible for the space. Does that settle the vacant-building question?
It settles who sweeps the floor. It does not settle who owns the condition, because the moment a lease ends there is no tenant to carry anything and both the municipal obligation and the policy consequence land on ownership by default. Build the handoff into the lease and into your own calendar: what happens the week a space goes dark, who walks it, who holds keys, and who tells your broker. That version is worth more than the one reconstructed at claim time.
I am converting a Court Avenue warehouse. What changes for insurance during and after?
Two things, and the gap between them is where owners get caught. During the work the property is not an operating rental building and generally needs a builders risk placement rather than a lessors risk one. Afterwards the exposure is a new building inside an old shell: heavy timber and brick outside, modern systems and often a habitational component inside. Underwriters price the combination rather than either half, and the rehab documentation you kept is what proves the modern half exists.
Our building connects to the skywalk. Does that change our exposure?
It changes who is on your property and how they arrived. A connection is a shared structure between separately owned buildings, which raises questions worth answering early: who maintains the link itself, whose general liability responds to a slip inside it, and what the operating agreement says about access hours and closing it off. None of that is exotic. It is simply easy to leave undocumented for years, and the wrong time to read it is after somebody falls.
What does loss of rents really look like for a Des Moines owner?
It looks like the months after a hailstorm rather than the day of it. When one system hits a whole region at once, roofing and glazing capacity across central Iowa gets consumed quickly, so the repair timeline that decides how much rent you lose tends to be set by contractor availability rather than by the damage. Ask what period of restoration your policy assumes and whether it is honest about a regional event, because a limit sized for one building fire runs short when everyone is rebuilding at once.
Sources
The Des Moines duties quoted above come from the city’s own published ordinance. Check them at the source:
Tell us the address, what is in it, and how the leases are written. You get back an honest read on where it places and the questions that will actually decide it.
