Lessors risk insurance by state
Lessors Risk Insurance in Washington
A mountain range runs down the middle of Washington and sorts its leased buildings into two quite different files. West of the crest the commercial stock is older — brick and heavy timber in the port and mill towns, put up back when those towns were shipping something — and the wet half of the year works away at it steadily. East of the crest the ground is dry, the summers are long, and where the developed edge of town stops is where the underwriting question begins.
What Washington law says
The vacancy provision
We did not find a standard fire policy printed in Washington’s insurance code. That is a limit on what we searched, not a finding that no such provision exists — so treat your own policy’s vacancy condition as the operative text and read it before a building sits empty.
Which leaves the clause that governs an empty Washington building sitting in the contract you already hold: the search of the state’s insurance code did not turn up a printed form, and that sentence is about the search rather than about Washington. Go and find the clause before a space is empty, because of what an empty building here is actually exposed to. On the wet side it is nothing dramatic — a downspout that has come apart, flashing lifted at a parapet, water into the framing with a whole rainy season to work at it and nobody walking the floor to notice. On the dry side it is the opposite problem, a building at the edge of town with nobody keeping the ground around it cut back. Neither announces itself, and neither is what an owner pictures when picturing a vacancy problem. So put it to whoever handles the account: what has to keep running in the building, who is going through it, how often, and what they are expected to write down when they do.
If the standard market declines the building
Washington maintains a residual-market mechanism for property that cannot be placed conventionally: Washington essential property insurance inspection and placement program (FAIR plan), WAC ch. 284-19.
One more thing a Washington landlord should know
Washington gives fire insurers a statutory cancellation trigger keyed to vacancy, but vacancy alone does not satisfy it — the statute requires a combination of the conditions it lists, and expressly carves out structures maintained for seasonal occupancy or under construction or repair. It also sets a separate unoccupied-rental-unit test for multi-tenant buildings, which is the provision that matters most to a landlord.
Washington’s insurance regulator is the Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner, which is where to verify any producer’s license before you buy.
A paired panel about a leased Washington building, read across from left to right. The left column holds physical facts an owner can point at: unreinforced brick holding up an old mill-town block, a rainy season long enough to find a single bad seam, open ground running dry right up to the east wall, a shell that would sell for less than the materials standing in it, and a leased suite gone dark between tenants. The right column holds, in the same order, the question underwriting puts to each of those facts: what the building department would require if the block had to go back up, whether the damage reads as a sudden event or as upkeep that was deferred, how far the ground around the building is cut back and whose job that is, how the limit was arrived at and what coinsurance does to it, and whether the wording still counts the building as tenanted. A note beneath the panel separates water that rises from water that finds its way in.
A physical fact about the Washington building
The question underwriting puts to that fact
Water that rises is a different purchase from water that gets in.
Where we write in Washington
Building stock, development pattern and municipal ordinances vary far more between cities than state law does. The city pages carry that detail.
By property type
What answers each of these in the policy
The exposures above are Washington law and Washington geography. These are the coverage lines that respond to them, explained without the state attached:
- Business Income & Loss of Rents
- Commercial Property
- General Liability
- Commercial Umbrella
- Tenant Discrimination
What all of that costs in Washington, and which of the drivers you control: How Much Does Commercial Property Insurance Cost in Washington?
Washington lessors risk insurance FAQs
The page says a standard fire policy was not found in the code. So what decides this for my building?
Your own contract does. We read the Washington insurance code and did not come across a printed fire policy form in it, which is a report on what our search reached rather than a ruling about the state. That leaves the vacancy or unoccupancy condition in the policy on your building as the text that matters. Pull the form out, find the condition, and read it in a week when the building is full — it is short, and it is the sentence that gets quoted back at you after a loss.
There is a note above about Washington law and an empty building. How much should that change what I do?
Read it where it sends you, in the statute itself, rather than in our summary or a broker’s. The thing worth carrying away is the distinction sitting underneath it: a carrier ending a policy and a policy narrowing what it answers for are separate events with separate triggers, and an owner can run into one without running into the other. What follows practically is dull and effective. Tell the carrier in writing before a space goes quiet, and keep whatever comes back.
Water has been getting in around a parapet since the rain started. Is that a claim?
Probably not, and the word doing the work is sudden. A commercial property form answers an event, not a condition that has been developing for months — and on the wet side of this state a slow one gets an entire season to work at framing and interior finish before anybody opens up a ceiling. Deterioration, wear and a maintenance item left undone are ordinarily excluded outright. So keep the roof, the drains and the flashings on a written schedule, and keep the invoices where you can find them.
My tenants are in a brick block that went up long before anyone put steel in a wall. What gets asked about that?
Expect questions about the walls first: what they are built of, whether anything has ever been done to tie them into the floors and the roof, and what shape the mortar is in. Then expect a second set about putting the block back, because an old commercial shell in a Washington port or mill town can cost a great deal more to rebuild than it would ever fetch. Raise the ordinance or law limit in that same conversation, and get the valuation basis written down rather than assumed.
We own a building on the dry side of the state and the standard market has stopped quoting it. What now?
Get the real reason for the decline in writing first, because much of what drives one out there sits inside your control — the vegetation and stored material immediately around the building, the roof covering, and whether a fire crew could reach the site and turn around on it. If the standard market still will not look at the building, Washington runs an essential property insurance inspection and placement program, named and linked above. The name describes the process, and it is where the market ends rather than where a bargain starts.
Washington does not seem to have a department of insurance. Who takes a complaint about the company insuring my building?
The Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner. It is a commissioner’s office rather than a department, which is only a naming difference until you are the one searching for it. That office licenses the companies and the producers writing commercial property here, and it takes complaints against an admitted company. The office itself is linked at the foot of this page under Sources. Put whoever is trying to sell you this policy through the license lookup before money moves — ourselves as readily as anybody else.
Sources
Read these before you read us. They are the Washington originals — the rule, the statute section and the office — and they will still be there when this page has gone out of date:
- Washington — the state’s own source for the residual-market mechanism — the residual market named above, where the standard market declines a building
- Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner — the state regulator named above, and where to verify any producer’s license
- Washington — primary source — the state-specific point noted above
Get the Washington building looked at, not just rated
Give us the construction — what the walls are, what is holding up the roof, roughly when the block went up — plus where in the state it stands and what the tenants do inside it. You get back which market we would take it to, what we expect an underwriter to push on, and where our answer is still a guess.