Commercial property is no longer just bricks, steel and a lease agreement. Warehouses are increasingly used for fulfilment, offices operate around hybrid working patterns and factories can run unattended overnight. For brokers, that means understanding a property risk increasingly depends on understanding what happens inside the building as well as the building itself.
Chris Buchholz (pictured), head of broking at Sona Insurance, said the change is particularly visible in manufacturing, where businesses are investing heavily in automation and unattended processes.
"Commercial buildings now are just used for so much more than they've ever been used before," he said, pointing to "things that may be running overnight that wouldn't have been doing 10, 15, 20 years ago."
That complexity is changing what a broker fact-find looks like. Questions have become "much more in-depth and operational", because what looks like a minor change to a client can materially alter how an insurer views the risk.
"When we're doing our fact finds with clients and we're doing our due diligence, we have to be so much more thorough than we ever had to be before, and take the time to understand the risk and what that means for an insurer," Buchholz said.
New machinery, additional storage areas, subletting part of a building or moving to multi-tenant arrangements are all examples. Clients aren't expected to see these changes the way an insurer would, leaving brokers to translate what they mean for the risk.
"We don't expect clients to think about the way that insurers will see things, because that's not their world – that's the life of a broker: to consider what does that mean to an insurer when they're looking at the risk," he said.
Manufacturing has become "much more efficient than it ever used to be", Buchholz said, through automated production lines, robotics and smart technology. But greater efficiency can also create greater dependency on individual machines and processes, increasing the potential consequences when something goes wrong.
"It's not just protecting the physical asset – fire, flood, whatever it may be," he said. "It's the continuity of the business off the back of that."
Repair costs for damaged machinery can be steep, but Buchholz said that's rarely the biggest expense: "The consequences of the downtime [are] way more than the actual cost to repair them." Each day a production line stands idle compounds the loss further, in what he described as "a snowball issue."
Greater reliance on technology introduces its own source of interruption too. "Cyber could impact that if they're relying on tech," Buchholz said, pointing to ransomware and denial-of-service attacks as risks that grow alongside automation itself.
Sitting underneath these changing exposures is an older problem: under-insurance. Material and labour costs surged during the pandemic and rebuild cost pressures have continued, increasing the risk of properties being insured against outdated valuations. The construction material price index for all work rose 6% in the 12 months to June 2026, according to the Department for Business and Trade's latest building materials statistics, with structural steel rising faster still.
"Businesses are focusing on growth and making sure that they run the business successfully. But the insurance programmes that back those businesses up need to evolve alongside that," Buchholz said.
"Rebuild costs, labour, material prices are still fluctuating very aggressively," he said. Climate resilience sits alongside this as another area clients can underestimate, with flooding and extreme weather capable of disrupting individual premises and wider supply chains.
For Buchholz, addressing this means brokers can no longer be judged on price alone. "We're not just measured on what's the best premium, what can you get me, what can you save me," he said. "It's about helping the client identify their own risks themselves that they hadn't considered before, and ultimately making sure that the insurers get an accurate picture of that business."
"Better quality information means better underwriting, better outcomes, and ultimately less surprises when it comes to the inevitable claim," Buchholz said. Technology may make obtaining a quote easier, including through AI-assisted tools, but the harder task remains understanding what needs to be insured and keeping that assessment current.
As Buchholz put it, the businesses best protected will be those "regularly reviewing those kind of impacts and those issues as part of their wider risk management strategy, and not just as part of an annual policy purchasing exercise."
For brokers, that makes understanding how a client's business is changing an ongoing responsibility rather than a conversation reserved for renewal.
