News
Reporting and analysis on the deals, pricing, and coverage trends shaping commercial insurance.
Showing 9 of 12 articles
Article · Jun 24, 2026 · 9 min read
Property and Casualty Insurance Just Split in Two: What New York's Rate Bill Gets Wrong
A check is hitting bank accounts in Florida this week. USAA is returning close to $1 billion to roughly 830,000 of its Florida policyholders, and carriers do not hand money back unless something underneath the business has fundamentally changed. New York is now betting it can manufacture the same kind of relief on the commercial side, by regulation rather than by reform. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie and Grace pulled live New York multifamily data from the Advocate app to test that bet, and the property and casualty insurance numbers told a very specific story: the bill is aimed at the wrong line.
Read now
Article · Jun 23, 2026 · 6 min read
AI in Insurance and the Rise of the K-Shaped Market
This episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk changed the usual format. Regular hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt opened and closed the show, but handed the main conversation to co-founder and CEO Ashwin Agarwal and his guest, Joe Zuk. Zuk is an operating partner at Altamont Capital and a board member at Accelerant, and he has worked across brokerage, MGA, reinsurance, and the capital side. He brought a thesis worth hearing: the K-shaped insurance market. That thesis ties directly to one of the biggest forces reshaping the industry, AI in insurance, and it explains why the top and bottom of the market get all the attention while the middle gets left behind.
Read now
Article · Jun 22, 2026 · 8 min read
What Crude Oil Prices Reveal About Your Liability Insurance Renewal
On a recent episode of *The Advocate Insurance Desk*, hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt opened with a question that sounds absurd: are crude oil prices and habitation **liability insurance** rates connected? Grace had been overlaying indices in Advocate's Terminal app and noticed that the WTI crude oil index and the national liability index had nearly the same shape, with the same peaks, the same trough, and the same sharp spike into 2026. This piece walks through their data and the answer they landed on, which changes how to read an insurance renewal.
Read now
Article · Jun 21, 2026 · 6 min read
Insuring AI Data Centers: Why Business Interruption Insurance Now Drives the Deal
Data centers are the hottest asset class in commercial real estate right now — capital is pouring in, valuations are enormous, and the buildings are some of the most complex structures going up anywhere. But the insurance behind them is quietly becoming one of the hardest parts of getting a deal done. On a recent episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, host Katie Dowson and Advocate co-founder and CEO Ashwin Agarwal sat down with Rachel Nixon of IMA — who has placed data center coverage for more than 20 years and recently helped structure a $4 billion placement. Their conversation kept circling one idea: in this asset class, business interruption insurance, not the building itself, is what really drives the deal.
Read now
Article · Jun 12, 2026 · 5 min read
Same Math, Different Wrapper: Prediction Markets and Insurance Data Analytics
On a recent episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Grace Schmidt and Katie Dowson stepped just outside the commercial real estate insurance market to look at something sitting right next to it: prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi. Their argument is that prediction markets and insurance are doing structurally the same job, pricing the probability of a future event, and that the gap between the two is closing fast in specific corners of the market. The thread connecting them, and the reason the episode matters for insurance, is insurance data analytics: the real-time pricing layer the industry has historically lacked.
Read now
Article · Jun 3, 2026 · 9 min read
$150M in Flood Penalties. The Rules Didn't Change, the Banks Didn't Learn.
The Atlantic hurricane season opened on June 1, and on The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt used it to make a point that has little to do with the weather. Flood risk in commercial real estate is now as much a compliance problem as a coverage one. The flood layer of commercial property insurance sits inside a web of federal rules, and the regulators just attached a $150 million number to what happens when lenders get it wrong. As Grace put it, this is not just the bank's problem: if you are a broker helping place coverage on a CRE deal in a flood zone and the flood insurance is not right at closing, you are part of this story too.
Read now
Article · May 27, 2026 · 8 min read
Captives, Parametric, and the New Math of Holding Your Own Risk
On episode 14 of The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt dug into a pattern in their data: the property and casualty market is splitting, with property finally softening while liability keeps hardening, and multifamily operators are responding by changing how they hold risk. Rather than buying more commercial real estate insurance from a market that is pricing against them, they are turning to captives and parametric coverage to retain risk on their own terms. What was a Fortune 500 conversation three years ago is now reaching operators of every size. This piece breaks down why it is happening, what the tools actually are, and what operators at different scales should do about it.
Read now
Article · May 6, 2026 · 9 min read
AI Just Got Carved Out of the Commercial General Liability Policy, and Almost No One Noticed
Three of the largest carriers in the country just won approval to walk away from a major category of commercial risk, and it has barely been covered in the news. This month Chubb, Berkshire Hathaway, and Travelers all got the green light from state regulators to start excluding AI related damages from the standard commercial general liability policy. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie and Grace broke down what is being quietly removed, brought in Advocate's head of infrastructure and security to give the operator's view, and landed on a simple rule: visibility first, coverage second.
Read now
Article · Apr 29, 2026 · 10 min read
Your $1 Million Limit Might Be Worth $250,000: The Assault and Battery Trap in Commercial Real Estate Insurance
The number on your declarations page is not your coverage. That is the uncomfortable lesson sitting underneath one of the sneakier problems in commercial real estate insurance right now: assault and battery coverage, the protection that responds when someone is hurt or killed by a violent act on your property. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie and Grace traced how that coverage has been quietly carved out of general liability policies, walked through a court case where it cost an operator everything, pulled their own placement data across two states, and asked whether the new standalone products hitting the market actually fix the problem or just hide it better.
Read now
Be a guest
Have a deal, a perspective, or a placement worth talking about?
We record short, focused interviews with brokers, underwriters, capital partners, and risk managers. Tell us what you'd unpack on air and we'll be in touch within a week.