Condo Association Insurance

As a condo association, you’re walking a delicate line between insurance policies. Each of your individual condo unit owners has certain liabilities. So does the property owner.

And so does the condo association, as a business entity.

At Gonzalez & Company, we’re familiar with the dance between the condo association’s by-laws, the condo owner’s insurance policy, and the individual unit owner’s policies. We know that every condo association’s by-laws are different and need to be scrutinized carefully for any potential pitfalls. Many claims that involve a condo’s common elements and individual units result in litigation, and you need to be sure you’re covered properly.

Why Condo Insurance Is Different

A brief primer on condo ownership as it relates to insurance: it can be extremely difficult to determine where the individual unit owner’s responsibility leaves off and the condo association’s begins. Most cases go to litigation because each of these entities is pointing the finger at one of the others as the sole responsible party – and often, insurance policies are not written to alleviate this confusion.

At Gonzalez & Company, we do everything in our power to make sure the condo board’s liability is written down clearly in black and white so you can avoid litigation. We cannot and do not act as legal counsel, but we can help you analyze your potential exposures through our longstanding experience in the condo industry, and provide recommendations to protect against these exposures. We also have the experience to bring up important issues that frequently aren’t mentioned when drawing up insurance policies – for example, are you covered if a member of your condo board steals from the association? That’s a severe exposure, rarely mentioned in a standard condo policy, and we make sure our clients are aware of that risk and covered against it.

Custom-Tailored Convenience

To help reduce the complexity of managing all the necessary insurance information for a condo building, we offer a few services to make creating and maintaining your policy easier:

• Unit owners typically require certificates of insurance directly from us. Unlike most firms, we offer these certificates free of charge when we cover your condo association, thus avoiding penalizing you for having a large number of units to cover.
• If your association is professionally managed, we can set the management company up with a website login so they can produce certificates of insurance for the unit owners. This saves on time and aggravation, and makes you look efficient to your unit owners as a property manager – always a perk.
• As necessary, we can provide unit owners with their own individual condo policies (HO-6). This means each individual tenant has the ability to ensure their personal homeowners’ policy coincides nicely with the condo association’s policy, and that there are no gaps in coverage in case of an unforeseen event.

We know condo insurance inside and out, and we’re here to help you avoid the pitfalls. We can dispel the common misconceptions people often have about what each type of insurance ought to cover, what unit owners are responsible for, and what the association is responsible for. Most importantly, we make sure you have the coverage you need to avoid costly litigation.