Bridging Continents to Deliver a Vacant Property Quote

Lloyd’s of London has long been an important market for excess and surplus (E&S) business, but sometimes the client is on the West coast, the insurer is in London and completion time to purchase property is tight.

For a broker like Burns & Wilcox, which has Lloyd’s underwriting and binding authority for vacant property policies, the five-hour or more time difference between agent and market is no barrier to good service.

On a Friday afternoon last spring, a California agent approached his contact in the Burns & Wilcox San Francisco office requesting a quote for property coverage for a large vacant site that formerly housed an auto dealership.

With six empty buildings and close to $5 million in limits needed, this was a potentially lucrative deal for the agent, but he needed to supply a quote that day. It also was a particularly large placement that required submission to someone with a higher level of expertise to underwrite and submit for Lloyd’s.

The request was immediately forwarded to Roxanne Logan, the property and casualty underwriter manager for the Burns & Wilcox Special Risk Division, who has that qualification and was still at her desk in Farmington Hills, Mich., at 5:15 p.m. when the application arrived.

“We did a lot of back and forth correspondence verifying values and other information, but by 6:30-a little more than an hour-I was able to release my quote, and we bound the insurance that Monday,” she said. “We could even expand the basic coverage with ‘special causes of loss’ provisions and provide coverage on a ‘replacement cost’ rather than ‘actual cash value’ basis.”

“All in all, we were able to impress them [agent and client] by expediting the request and meeting their needs,” she said.