October has its own claim to pop culture infamy: the annual scarefest known as Halloween. How appropriate that one of my latest email queries contained a scary assumption:

Let's say you have a property policy, where you have the building owner and tenant listed on the same policy. They are one and the same when it comes to ownership. The only difference here is that we have two different corporations listed on this policy. We cover the building in the name of the one corporation and we cover the BPP in the name of the other corporation. We have an application that lists both corporations, one as the building owner and the other as whatever the business is. We have a written lease where the tenant is paying the building owner rent every month, too. Will the business income and extra expense limit include the loss of rents for the building owner, or do I need to have two different coverages? Should the property application look like building, and loss of rents for the building owner show the BPP limit for the tenant (who is the same owner) with the business income and extra expense exposure?

This question is not uncommon. Insureds often create interesting legal and contractual blurred lines, typically for purposes having little to do with what would make insurance easier to write. But the agent added his own word crimes to the client's blurred lines, creating the potential to turn mere confusion into a truly scary E&O. Aalthough the underwriters should know better, perhaps they can be cut a bit of slack about those weeds when the agent may have led them into the swamp. To reveal how, reverse the order of the second and third sentences, then consider them one at a time: The only difference here is that we have two different corporations listed on this policy.