Showing 9 of 22 articles
Article · Oct 1, 2026 · 8 min read
Multifamily Property Insurance: Same Building, 2x the Price
Two multifamily buildings matched on county, size, rebuild cost, age, and policy structure price within about 3% of each other when they land with the same carrier, and about two times apart when they land with different carriers. On this solo episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, Katie Dowson tests whether that property insurance spread tracks risk. The data says it does not. Across four progressively tighter matching steps, the same-carrier gap held near 1x while the cross-carrier gap never narrowed. The analysis covers trailing 12 months of multifamily property placements in the Advocate app, measured by three-digit ZIP territory, and the widest pricing dispersion in the country sits more than 200 miles from the coast.
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Article · Sep 17, 2026 · 10 min read
Commercial Property Insurance Rates Fell 31% Through a $35 Billion Storm Year. Texas Fell Fastest.
US commercial property insurance rate on line fell roughly 31 percent over the trailing twelve months, from near $0.50 to about $0.33 per $100 of coverage, in the same year that US severe convective storms produced more than $35 billion of insured loss. Those two facts sit badly together, and on The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt took the position that neither one is wrong. The hypothesis under test was that the softening reflects a market that has stopped pricing storm risk. That hypothesis failed. If carriers were indiscriminately ignoring convective storm exposure, rate would fall at a similar pace everywhere. It did not. The market with the heaviest exposure to the peril generating the losses is the market that repriced downward the hardest. The method was a three state comparison built on Advocate placement data, filtered by peril exposure rather than by geography alone. Texas properties sitting well above the US average for wind, hail, and tornado exposure formed the high exposure group. California and Washington properties, both well below that average, served as controls. Rate on line throughout is premium per $100 of coverage. A second pass tested the same book by building vintage to rule out changes in the composition of the portfolio. Three results followed. Rate fell in all three markets, but Texas fell at roughly twice the pace of either control. The decline survived two separate mix tests, meaning the same buildings are being written at lower prices rather than the average being dragged down by newer risks entering the book. And the loss total, large as it is, never reached the layer of capital that actually sets price, which is the mechanism that reconciles the whole picture.
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Article · Sep 3, 2026 · 11 min read
Florida Multifamily Liability: The Coverage Gaps Sitting Above the Primary Layer
Coverage gaps in Florida habitational programs are concentrated in the layer that owners benchmark least. On this week's Data Pulse, Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt took Advocate placement data into the Florida multifamily liability market and found that the state's pricing differential against the rest of the country sits almost entirely above the primary layer, and that close to half the market is written outside the admitted system. The method was a layer by layer comparison of Florida against national placements, measured in rate on line, defined as premium per $100 of coverage. That unit allows large and small policies to be compared directly. The results ran in three parts: property and casualty pricing in Florida have moved in opposite directions for four consecutive years, the Florida premium is an excess layer phenomenon rather than a primary one, and carrier level rate comparisons are unreliable without layer mix alongside them. The framing number was not a Florida number. Commercial premiums rose for 33 consecutive quarters before the run ended in the first quarter of 2026. Eight years and change of rates moving in one direction, and then a turn. That turn is the story most trade coverage has run this year. Taken into Florida multifamily, the data shows that half of the coverage never received the decrease, and it is the half owners spend the least time on.
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Article · Aug 21, 2026 · 11 min read
Price Benchmarking California Property | Data Pulse
Over the trailing 12 months, the most expensive carrier writing California multifamily property was the state's insurer of last resort. The California FAIR Plan averaged 62.8 cents of premium per $100 of coverage, roughly three times Lloyd's at 20.8 cents, in a segment where private capital was available and actively deploying. That finding opens Data Pulse, a new weekly price benchmarking segment on The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosted by Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt.
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Article · Aug 14, 2026 · 9 min read
Insurance Automation That Knows Where to Stop: Inside ALKEME's AI Playbook
Most insurance automation conversations stall at one of two extremes: none of it is real yet, or all of it is about to replace everybody. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt talk with somebody who has actually shipped AI inside a working agency rather than sold it from the vendor side. Ryan Deeds, Head of AI at ALKEME Insurance, has automated a live piece of the renewal process, moved an entire band of small accounts onto an automated servicing track, and drawn a deliberate line where the software stops and a person picks up the phone. The interesting question, as Dowson framed it at the top of the episode, is not what you can automate. It is where you choose not to.
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Article · Aug 5, 2026 · 12 min read
Your AI Vendor Has a Supply Chain: Three Questions to Ask Before You Buy
Nearly every vendor selling into commercial insurance now mentions AI somewhere in the pitch. Very few of them will tell a buyer which part of an answer was calculated and which part was generated, and that single distinction is the most useful tool an insurance AI vendor evaluation can give you. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, host Katie Dowson sits down with David Haddad, head of product engineering at Advocate Technologies, to work through what actually goes into building AI software for a regulated market, and how a broker, lender, or servicer sitting through a demo can tell a real system from a thin wrapper. The premise of the conversation is that the model is the least interesting part of the product. Models improve every few months, and that improvement arrives whether or not the team using them is ready for it. What determines whether the software can be trusted is everything built around the model: deciding what it is allowed to do, knowing when it is wrong, and staying upright when something changes underneath you.
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Article · Jul 29, 2026 · 10 min read
MGAs and Fronting Carriers: Who Is Behind Your Commercial Insurance Policy?
Your renewal arrives from the same broker you have used for years. The number is competitive, the paperwork looks like every other commercial insurance policy you have ever received, and so you bind it and move on. Why wouldn't you? Here is the problem. Almost nobody stops to ask who is actually standing behind that paper, and the honest answer is increasingly that the company named on your declarations page neither priced your risk nor holds it. A managing general agent underwrote you, a fronting carrier lent its name to the policy, and reinsurers you will never be told about are the ones with money at stake. That chain is invisible from the buyer's seat, and it can reprice or disappear on you at renewal for reasons that have nothing to do with your account. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, co-hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt walk through how the MGA and fronting structure actually works, what happened when a reinsurance intermediary collapsed in 2023, and the three questions you can answer tonight from a document already in your hand.
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Article · Jul 22, 2026 · 7 min read
The Independent Insurance Broker's Soft Market Playbook
For more than a decade, being an independent insurance broker meant delivering the same conversation over and over: rates are up, capacity is tight, carriers are pulling back. Most of your energy went into managing bad news. That era is ending, at least on the property side of the book. Carriers are hungry to grow again, and for the first time in a long time, your clients are hearing that they have options. So the real question for a small shop is no longer how to survive a hard market. It is this: if the market is opening up for everyone, including the national brokerages, how does a two person agency actually win? The answer is not size. It never really was. The gap between a small brokerage and a national one was almost always a gap in visibility. The big shops could see the whole market. The smaller shop usually could not. That is the thing that is changing, and it is what this playbook is about. Below are five moves a small commercial shop can make right now. Each one is something you can run inside the Advocate app, using actual placed policy data rather than rumor or gut feel.
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Article · Jul 16, 2026 · 8 min read
Price Benchmarking in a Split Market: What the "Hard Market Is Over" Headlines Get Wrong
The headline everyone repeated this year was simple: after roughly a decade of increases, commercial insurance rates finally turned. The index dipped, and the trade press declared the hard market over. But that clean narrative papers over the single most important fact for anyone pricing risk right now. The market did not soften. Half of it did. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, Katie and Grace walked through three headlines that moved the commercial property and casualty world, and why each one points back to the same conclusion: in a split market, the only number that helps you is a carrier-level one.
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