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 Property and Casualty Insurance
COMMERCIAL PROPERTY BASICS
Just as homeowners insurance protects a homeowner from the full cost of repairing unforeseen damage to a house, commercial property insurance protects businesses against damage to their buildings and contents.
Commercial property owners, both those operating a business on their property and those leasing property to another entity, may purchase policies that protect the building and associated structures. A property owner´s policy will not protect tenants from loss. Business owners who lease their property may buy policies that protect the building´s contents, such as machinery, furniture and stored or displayed merchandise.
Commercial property policies generally fall into three categories:
Basic form -- covers common perils, such as damage caused by fire, lightning, windstorm, vehicles, aircraft, and civil commotion.
Broad form -- covers basic perils while adding others, such as water damage, collapse, glass breakage, weight of snow, ice or sleet, and sprinkler leakage.
Special form -- covers any cause of loss except those specifically excluded, such as flood, earth movement, war, nuclear disaster, wear and tear, insects, and vermin.
COMMERCIAL GENERAL LIABILITY BASICS
Commercial General Liability (CGL) - The CGL policy is an ISO form, widely used to provide commercial enterprises with premises and operations liability coverage, products and completed operations insurance and personal injury coverage. General liability insurance is coverage for an insured when negligent acts and/or omissions result in bodily injury and/or property damage on the premises of a business, when someone is injured as the result of using the product manufactured or distributed by a business, or when someone is injured in the general operation of a business.
Products and completed operations liability - The liability exposure of the manufacturer whose malfunctioning products may cause injury or property damage or of the contractor whose failed structures or projects may do the same. Coverage of the exposure is a feature of the commercial general liability policy. The insurance does not in any way constitute a guarantee of either the insured's product or work. Products and completed operations insurance is coverage for an insured manufacturer for claims after a manufactured product has been sold and/or a claim results from an operation which the manufacturer has completed.
Advertising injury - Claim arising out of slander, libel, copyright infringement, or misappropriation of advertising ideas. Coverage is provided as part of coverage B of the commercial general liability policy.
Personal injury - Distinguished from "bodily injury," this term relates to injury inflicted by way of false arrest, invasion of privacy, malicious prosecution, and so on. It is written as Coverage B of the commercial general liability forms and as homeowners Coverage E.
Fire legal liability - Public liability policies routinely exclude coverage for damage to property in an insured's care, custody, or control. This leaves a big gap in a tenant's coverage, a gap partially filled by an exception in the commercial general liability policy that restores limited coverage for fire damage to the landlord's building.
Medical payments insurance - A coverage found in auto and liability policies that pays medical expenses to injured persons without regard to liability. |
