Advocate Insurance Desk

Welcome to the Advocate Insurance Desk Podcast 🎙️We break down insurance compliance, risk, and pricing across commercial real estate using real data from Advocate's Market Terminal, not anecdotes. Hear conversations with industry leaders and practical insights on how technology is reshaping lenders, brokers, and carriers.If you work in CRE or insurance, this is for you.Subscribe for full episodes and clips.YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AdvocateInsuranceDeskLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/advocate-technologies

Advocate Insurance Desk is a business podcast hosted by Advocate Technologies, with 30 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Advocate Technologies hosts Advocate Insurance Desk, a business show with 30 episodes published.

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  Episode #30

  Same Building, Double the Price: The Multifamily Property Insurance Gap

  Sep 23, 202612 minS1

  Two multifamily buildings in the same county, matched on size, age, rebuild cost, policy structure and perils, price within 3% of each other at the same carrier. At different carriers, they price about two times apart. The gap is widest inland, not on the coast. St. Louis tops the table at 6.92x, 557 miles from salt water. After 20 years of hurricane modeling, coastal wind is the peril carriers agree on. Hail and severe convective storm are where they don't. In this Data Pulse, Katie walks through trailing twelve months multifamily property data from the Advocate Market Terminal. We cover: How market spread is measured, and why it widens as buildings get more identical Inland territories vs coastal: 4.32x median spread vs 3.34x Observed vs adjusted spread, and why Indianapolis moves the other way Named storm vs severe convective storm as the real driver of carrier disagreement Blanket vs standalone pricing: a structure problem wearing a geography costume Landmark American vs Westchester Surplus: what a tight pricing range actually tells you What the terminal can and can't see, and what a 2x spread really means for your renewal See where your renewal sits against the book: https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast Chapters 0:00 Two identical buildings, double the price 1:09 How we tested market spread 2:29 The spread widens as buildings get more alike 3:35 Where carriers disagree most: inland vs coast 4:28 Observed vs adjusted spread by territory 5:51 Why inland: named storm vs hail and convective storm 7:21 Blanket vs standalone pricing 8:21 Carrier discipline: Landmark American vs Westchester 9:30 Why nobody could see this until now 10:41 Which side of a 2x gap is right? 11:01 Summary Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  Episode #30

  The Riskiest Property Market in America Is Getting Cheaper

  Sep 17, 202616 minS1

  Every property owner who got a softer renewal quote this year assumes the market forgot about the storms. The data says the storms never reached the people who set the price. In this episode, Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt take one contradiction apart. Industry figures from Gallagher Re put US severe convective storm losses above 35 billion dollars year to date, across six separate billion dollar outbreaks, and we are only in August. Commercial property rates have been falling that entire time. Both of those things are true, and neither one is a mistake. The Advocate Insurance Desk is a data-driven commercial insurance podcast. We use the Advocate Market Terminal, our insurance intelligence platform, to show exactly what is happening inside specific markets: real carrier behavior, real premiums, real pricing by segment. This episode is a pricing episode, and everything on the terminal side comes from placed business. The loss totals and outbreak counts are industry sourced and, as Grace says on air, still moving. The core idea: rate is priced off reinsurance capital, not off primary capital, and a convective storm year almost never touches reinsurance capital. The losses arrive as tens of thousands of modest claims spread across dozens of carriers and dozens of states, none of them large enough to punch through a single carrier's retention. That loss sits on primary earnings, where it was budgeted for all along. The capital that actually sets price spent the year untouched, and when it came back looking for somewhere to go, it did not avoid the risk everyone has been talking about. It went straight at it. We get into the national rate on line trend and what happens when you overlay every disaster marker on it, the three state test we built to see whether high exposure markets are repricing differently, why Texas is now within ten percent of California after sitting thirty four cents above it, the objection that this is just a newer and safer book rather than a real rate cut, what happened when we froze the building mix and ran it again, how retentions work and why they are a deductible for the whole insurance company, and the two explanations for the Texas move that produce an identical renewal quote today and very different outcomes the next time capital gets tight. Your renewal number came back lower. Knowing which of those two things caused it is the whole question. Learn more about what we are building at https://advocate.app/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=podcast Chapters 0:00 Losses at 35 billion, rates falling anyway 0:46 Where that number comes from and why it keeps moving 1:32 Not a record year, but six outbreaks by August 2:11 The trading tab, twelve months and twenty four 2:33 Disaster markers stay dense as the rate falls 3:13 Building the test: Texas against two control states 4:04 What the three markets priced eighteen months ago 4:27 Texas falls almost twice as fast 5:35 The objection: is this rate or is this mix? 6:19 Pre 1980 buildings against post 2001 buildings 7:05 Freezing the mix and running it again 8:23 Same buildings, same risk, lower price 8:38 Retentions, or a deductible for the whole carrier 9:56 Putting a number on a fifty million dollar retention 10:40 Why convective storms rarely reach the reinsurer 11:26 Losses and rates running on two different clocks 11:58 Why Texas specifically fell the fastest 12:24 Capital competing hardest for the risk that just lost money 12:53 Two explanations, one identical renewal quote 13:48 Which story the speed of the decline points to 14:46 Bottom line, and whether the trend holds

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  Episode #28

  What Florida's Excess Layer Actually Costs: Multifamily Liability

  Sep 2, 202617 minS1

  Everyone benchmarks the primary layer, because primary is the easiest number to get hold of. It is also the one layer where Florida looks unremarkable. On an ordinary Florida garden style program, roughly nine tenths of what the state costs you over anywhere else is sitting above primary, in the layer almost nobody benchmarks. This week Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt run a data pulse on Florida multifamily liability using the Advocate Market Terminal: where the national market stands in mid August, how the Florida spread actually splits between primary and excess, what the carrier board looks like once you read the layer mix beside the rate, and the four year crossover that put general liability at nearly three times property on the same asset. All figures are rate on line, premium per one hundred dollars of coverage, drawn from the Advocate Market Terminal. Eighty thousand plus policies and five billion plus in premium. Run these cuts yourself at https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast Chapters 0:00 Welcome 1:18 How to read a rate on line 1:38 The National Market 2:40 The Florida Spread 4:23 The Layer Split 6:22 What the Spread Costs on a Real Program 7:54 Florida Liability Carriers 8:50 Where the Board Will Lie to You 10:06 The Four Year Crossover 11:28 In the News 12:41 The Surplus Lines Question 14:11 Close to a Coin Flip 15:09 The Takeaways

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  Episode #27

  What California's Last Resort Actually Costs: Multifamily Property

  Aug 19, 202614 minS1

  California's insurer of last resort is the most expensive option on the board in multifamily property. The FAIR Plan sits at 62.8 cents rate on line over the trailing twelve months. Lloyd's, writing the same segment on the surplus lines side, sits at 20.8. The story in the trade press this month is that the standard admitted market is returning to California. The terminal data says the return has not happened yet, and that when it arrives it is priced above what is already available in the state today. Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt go carrier by carrier through California multifamily property: who is writing the volume, why the gap between the residual market and the surplus lines market is not a like-for-like comparison, what the 2024 to 2026 trend actually shows, and why the Farmers filing reported by Insurance Journal on August 3rd looks more like a pilot than a re-entry. Then the question the data raises but does not answer. If private capital never left California, what is actually scarce? Every carrier level figure in this episode comes from the Advocate Market Terminal: average rate on line by carrier, California multifamily property, trailing twelve months. Four carriers sampled, not the full market. Run the same analysis on your own book at https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast. Chapters 00:00 The thesis: the return has not happened yet 00:41 Rate on line, explained 01:00 The national picture: property down, liability up 02:14 California multifamily, carrier by carrier 02:34 The FAIR Plan at 62.8 cents 03:27 Why this is not a like for like comparison 04:43 2024 to 2026: hardening, then a pullback 05:31 A ceiling is not the same thing as relief 06:17 Who is actually carrying the book 07:02 The admitted market is not in the room 07:51 The Farmers filing, and what it really is 09:22 Is the FAIR Plan working as designed? 11:20 What is scarce is not capital 12:47 Takeaways for California brokers

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  Episode #26

  AI Adoption at a 1,500 Person Agency with Ryan Deeds

  Aug 12, 202645 minS1

  Every agency leader who has watched an AI rollout stall assumes they bought the wrong tool. Ryan Deeds thinks they had the wrong problem. In this episode, Katie and Grace sit down with Ryan Deeds, Head of AI at ALKEME Insurance. Ryan has spent 25 years inside agency data, through retail brokerages, a conglomerate of more than 100 US and European agencies, before taking on AI across a 1,500 person organization. His argument is that technology stopped being the constraint a while ago, and what replaced it is whether the person on the other end feels safe enough to change how they work. The Advocate Insurance Desk is a data-driven commercial insurance podcast. Most episodes we use the Advocate Market Terminal, our insurance intelligence platform, to show exactly what is happening inside specific markets: real carrier behavior, real premiums, real pricing by segment. This episode steps off the pricing side entirely and into the operating side, where the data gets clean enough to trust in the first place. The core idea: if your employees do not feel protected when they try something new, no tool survives contact with them. Ryan builds around that. Audits that open with what people got right. Dashboards that talk back so a producer can dispute a number and a human answers. A one year old product at 40% adoption, which he calls a win, because he is not fighting for the last quarter of the org. And a hard line on where automation stops, drawn not by capability but by whether the buyer understands what they are buying. We get into why he is tired of dashboards and wants prescriptive next steps instead, the activity taxonomy that showed him where the friction actually was, why he wants three sources before he trusts one number, what "human at the edge" means once agents do the assembling, and why he now judges vendors on whether they hand him an API or make him log into their interface. Anybody can build anything now. The interesting question is what people will actually use. Learn more about what we are building at https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast Ryan Deeds is on LinkedIn and is happy to hear from people building in this space - > https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryancdeeds/. Chapters 0:00 The two extremes of every AI conversation in insurance 1:08 Ryan Deeds, 25 years and four different seats 3:42 Resistance to change is really a safety problem 5:30 An Excel macro on Tuesday, in production by Friday 9:49 Data is worthless if it does not drive the next step 10:36 Why he is tired of dashboards 11:44 The activity taxonomy that found the friction 14:04 Three sources to trust one number 17:11 The renewal checklist that took a day to build 18:39 Getting producers to adopt the tool 22:30 Where leadership has to carry it 24:10 40% adoption on a one year old product 25:15 Risk OS and the problem it is trying to solve 28:50 Human at the edge, not human in the loop 30:28 Moving small accounts to the hive 33:27 Cyber to issuance, workers comp to a person 36:12 Why the build versus buy calculus changed 37:54 Proprietary data as the five year moat 39:46 Give me the API, not your UI 44:05 Close

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