How does commercial building insurance differ from personal building insurance?

Commercial buildings typically include Office Buildings, used mostly as a workspace for people carrying out administration and considered one of the safest insurance risks; Warehouses, which are commercial buildings used primarily for the storage of goods; Retail Outlets, the most common type of commercial building in the UK, ranging from kiosks to small high street shops to great sprawling department stores; and Factories, which are similar to warehouses in their construction but obviously also house various different kinds of manufacturing process.

Each of these types of building comes with its own considerations when it comes to what type of insurance policy they will have to take out and how much premium they will have to pay. Office buildings typically incorporate the least risk and factories often the highest, depending on what is manufactured on the premises and what kind of hazardous materials are involved in the manufacturing process.

Specialist insurance products may also be required to cover the different kinds of heating and electrical systems each of these building types have.

Domestic tenants don’t run as many risks as commercial property tenants, as they don’t use industrial equipment or deal with dangerous materials, and therefore the insurance policies that they require are generally much simpler.