Australia's regional exodus during COVID-19 didn't just reshape the housing market - it quietly reshaped farm insurance too. Allianz Australia has redesigned its farm pack product specifically to catch up with a wave of hobby farmers the old policy was never built for, according to Julie Mitchell (pictured), the insurer's chief general manager of commercial and personal injury.
"There's also been structural expansion in things like hobby farms," Mitchell told Insurance Business. "That was a definite shift that emerged post-COVID, on the back of flexible working arrangements and the move from urban to regional migration." The trend lines up with independent data: the Regional Movers Index, produced by the Regional Australia Institute using Commonwealth Bank customer data, has consistently shown more people relocating from capital cities to regional areas than the reverse in the years since the pandemic began, with towns such as Albury recording a 16-fold increase in net migration from capitals in a single financial year. "Regional Australia is no longer a second choice – it's the smart choice," said Liz Ritchie, CEO of the Regional Australia Institute, of the sustained trend.
What makes this relevant to brokers isn't the initial spike - it's what happened afterwards. "There has been an uplift in hobby farms," Mitchell said. "You really did see it early on post-COVID - it definitely spiked in those couple of years. It's now normalised in the last couple of years, but over the last five years you can see a structural increase in the number of hobby farms."
That distinction matters for underwriting: A temporary pandemic blip would argue for waiting it out, while a structural increase argues for redesigning the product.
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The old farm pack simply wasn't built for this customer. Mitchell said the definition of a hobby farm has now been expanded to explicitly include properties that don't generate any income at all, alongside those earning up to $50,000 annually - addressing a gap that left genuine lifestyle-block owners either uninsured under farm-specific terms or forced into ill-fitting home and contents policies. That $50,000 threshold sits against a backdrop of a national agricultural workforce the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry's own 2026 sector snapshot described as increasingly diverse in scale and structure, from broadacre operations to small-scale and part-time farming activity.
For brokers advising clients moving from urban postcodes to acreage, the practical upshot is a clearer conversation at the point of sale. A client running chickens and a few paddocks purely for lifestyle reasons, with zero farm income, now sits squarely within Allianz's hobby farm definition rather than in a grey zone brokers previously had to manage manually or refer back to underwriters. That reduces both placement friction and the risk of a client discovering, at claim time, that their lifestyle block didn't actually meet the old product's income-based threshold.
The redesign also arrives alongside broader climate cover changes and updated motor accessory definitions - relevant to hobby farmers increasingly running solar setups, small machinery fleets and, in some cases, drones for property management. Brokers working this segment should treat the hobby farm definition change as the entry point for a wider conversation about whether a client's evolving lifestyle-block setup still matches the cover they took out years, or even months, ago.
For a segment that grew largely under the radar of mainstream farm insurance products, the risk shift in recent years is meaningful and one brokers advising tree-changers and lifestyle-block buyers should be actively raising at renewal.
