How Insurance offices work

Insurance agents come in two flavors, Independent and Non-independent. Insurance with an Independent Agent is very similar to a mortgage broker. The insurance agent deals with many other companies and will search to find the best deal for their customer among multiple insurance providers. Because of the need to find multiple companies to insure properties, Independent brokers are very common on the Approved Vendors List.

Non-Independent agents work for a specific company and can only sell that companies products. While they may not be able to offer as wide a variety of products their pricing can often be cheaper than an Independent agent.

Many offices will have staff to help you make changes, request refunds, and handle billing. While this staff can be helpful, they often know very little about the products being offered and can often confuse different policies. Save your more complicated questions about the appropriate policy to purchase for the actual agent.

Many agents will bind property immediately with as little as a phone call. Others will require a property inspection before binding coverage. Be sure to know how much lead time your agent needs to make sure your coverage can be bound at the proper time.

Insurance agents make their money on volume. Investment property policies do not pay a lot, so you need to make it extremely easy on them to work with you or your client. We have actually had agents drop us because they said it was too much working keeping up with our policies.

Make sure to cancel a policy when it is not needed. BD has spent thousands of dollars by not canceling policies after we sold a property and no longer needed it to be insured. The insurance company does not know when you sell and they will not retroactively reimburse you when you prove that you sold the property five months ago.