Building and Autos in the personal name(which is not a N.I.)
Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 7:58 pm
This is actually two questions in one, they just happen to be the same issue but for different policy types.
If we have a building owned in the personal name, which is not a named insured, isn't this a coverage gap? As I'm sure you are aware, many insurance companies will not combine the personal name with a business entity. That means in order to get named insured status you have to put the building on a separate policy with the personal name as named insured. This, of course, means more premium since you're buying two liability policies and you get the minimum premium twice.
Naturally, I'm talking about low premium situations; in this particular case, the premium is about $1000, but it's likely to go up to $1400 if written across two policies, which will of course make the customer unhappy. But the point of me asking this here is, there's not a consensus at my agency about whether it's necessary to do that. It's difficult for me to recommend to our customer writing the policies this way if the account's producer isn't in agreement, so I want to make sure that I'm not overanalyzing this.I have never personally seen a claim where either of these issues was raised, so I can't use that. I have been able to Google for a couple of vaguely related articles that support my position, but what I really need to drive the point home is some actual case studies of claims denied, and even better if they sued the insurance company and the court upheld the denial.
Just to be clear, this would be a situation where "ABC Company LLC" has a policy where ABC is the sole named insured. The LLC Member(the owner) however, has the building deeded to his own name. Would a claim adjuster not have grounds to deny a fire claim, despite the ownership connection with the LLC? And for a liability claim, is it not very possible that a liability suit could leave the business defended, but the individual person not?
Also, same question for autos.
If we have a building owned in the personal name, which is not a named insured, isn't this a coverage gap? As I'm sure you are aware, many insurance companies will not combine the personal name with a business entity. That means in order to get named insured status you have to put the building on a separate policy with the personal name as named insured. This, of course, means more premium since you're buying two liability policies and you get the minimum premium twice.
Naturally, I'm talking about low premium situations; in this particular case, the premium is about $1000, but it's likely to go up to $1400 if written across two policies, which will of course make the customer unhappy. But the point of me asking this here is, there's not a consensus at my agency about whether it's necessary to do that. It's difficult for me to recommend to our customer writing the policies this way if the account's producer isn't in agreement, so I want to make sure that I'm not overanalyzing this.I have never personally seen a claim where either of these issues was raised, so I can't use that. I have been able to Google for a couple of vaguely related articles that support my position, but what I really need to drive the point home is some actual case studies of claims denied, and even better if they sued the insurance company and the court upheld the denial.
Just to be clear, this would be a situation where "ABC Company LLC" has a policy where ABC is the sole named insured. The LLC Member(the owner) however, has the building deeded to his own name. Would a claim adjuster not have grounds to deny a fire claim, despite the ownership connection with the LLC? And for a liability claim, is it not very possible that a liability suit could leave the business defended, but the individual person not?
Also, same question for autos.