Renewal is the one deadline in the risk calendar that does not move. Your broker needs the submission weeks before the underwriters see it, and the underwriters decide on what they see. This property insurance renewal checklist is the one we walk through with risk managers who carry ten or more production sites. It is ordered the way the questions arrive.
Start twelve weeks out
- Agree the timeline with your broker. When does the submission go to market, and what must it contain? Work backwards from that date. Sites need two to three weeks to answer, and you need a week to review.
- Fix the valuation date. Values reported in ten currencies only compare if they are converted at exchange rates from the same date. Pick the date once and use it for every site.
- List every insured site. Include warehouses, distribution centres and third-party locations that hold your stock. Sites that opened, closed, were sold or moved since last renewal are where the errors hide.
1. Insured values per site
The underwriter wants buildings, machinery and equipment, stock and supplies, business interruption and the indemnity period, per site, in a known currency, with a total per site. Three things go wrong every year:
- Last year's number is copied forward because nobody at the site had time.
- Stock is counted at the site that owns it, not at the warehouse where it stands. Insurers price the building the goods are in, so the value lands on the wrong fire protection and the wrong flood zone.
- One site reports in local currency and the spreadsheet assumes euros.
Check that every site has reported this period rather than carried over, that changes against last year have an explanation (a 30% jump in machinery is either an investment or a typo), and that stock held at another site is recorded at that address. Value collection in 21RISK does this per site and per period, so last year's submission stays intact next to this year's. If you still run this in a workbook, Excel vs 21RISK for value collection lists what the workbook cannot tell you.
2. COPE information per site
Construction, occupancy, protection, exposure: the four headings an underwriter uses to describe a site. The values say how much is at risk. COPE says how likely it is to burn.
- Construction: materials, year of build, floor area, and any extension since last year.
- Occupancy: what the site does today, not what it did when the policy started. A hall that moved from assembly to storing lithium-ion batteries is a different risk.
- Protection: sprinklers, detection, water supply, and when each was last tested.
- Exposure: neighbours, fire sections, distance to water, and what sits on the other side of the fence.
Photos and inspection reports belong next to the answer, not in a separate folder. COPE information in 21RISK is documented once per site and kept current by the people on the ground. If you are short on time, these key COPE factors are the minimum.
3. Natural hazard exposure
Which of your plants sit in a flood zone? Which are exposed to windstorm or earthquake? The insurer will ask, and "we think none" is not an answer. Location is the basis for all of it, so start by checking that every site has an address that geocodes to the right building. A pin on the wrong side of a river changes the flood score.
For sites with reliable coordinates, natcat exposure in 21RISK reads earthquake, storm and flood scores from Munich Re per site, and the portfolio overview shows how your sites spread across the risk classes, weighted by the insured values of the period. Insurers increasingly ask about the next thirty years too; climate scenarios at 2030, 2050 and 2100 answer that from the same sites. If you are buying cover for exposed locations, read three considerations for natcat-exposed locations first.
4. Engineering report recommendations and their status
Underwriters rate your follow-up as much as your risk. Every recommendation from last year's risk engineering visits should have a status, an owner, a due date, a cost estimate, and evidence when it is done. A recommendation that has been open for three renewals is a story the underwriter tells about you.
Risk improvements in 21RISK track each recommendation from report to evidence. If the reports arrive as PDFs, engineering reports files them on the site, and on the Enterprise plan the recommendations are extracted as suggestions that you review before they become tracked improvements. On other plans you add the improvements from the report by hand, on the same site.
5. Loss history
Five years of losses, per site, with the cause and what changed afterwards. Your broker holds the loss run; what they do not hold is the second half of the sentence. For every larger loss, the fix belongs on the risk-improvement list above, with its evidence. That is what turns a loss into a reason to trust the site rather than a reason to load the premium. Claims handling in 21RISK is coming soon; until then keep the loss run next to the site list.
6. One owner per site
The checklist fails when nobody at the site owns the answer. Name a responsible person per site for values and for COPE, and let them answer for their own site while you review. The follow-up should come from a list of who has answered, not from your inbox on a Sunday. In 21RISK, a site responsibility names the owner on the site itself, and notifications tell you when a site updates its values, so the sites still missing are the only ones left to chase.
The checklist
- Submission date agreed with the broker, with a two-week buffer.
- One valuation date for every site.
- Site list complete, including warehouses and third-party locations.
- Values reported this period at every site, not carried over.
- Changes against last year explained.
- Stock held at another site recorded at that address.
- COPE current per site, with photos and inspection reports attached.
- Every site geocoded to the right building.
- Natcat and climate exposure known per site and for the portfolio.
- Every engineering recommendation has an owner, a date and a status.
- Loss history per site, with the fix documented.
- One named owner per site, and a list of who has not answered yet.
What changes when it is not a spreadsheet
Nilfisk ran this checklist in Excel and email for years. Steen Dandanell describes the pain point as sending out the sheets, keeping track of who has answered, and comparing this year against last year. After moving to 21RISK he estimates they saved about 75% of the time they used to spend collecting and analysing the data. Read the Nilfisk case .
At BHJ, Anke Hendriksen puts it as the chaos it would have been to collect all that data from all those people through a mailbox. Read the BHJ case .
The mechanism is the same in both: you send one request, sites answer in the app, and your broker sees insurer-ready numbers from day one. If you want to see the checklist run on your own sites before the next renewal, talk to us .