A HAILuva Lot of Damage

Whether you're a single-property landlord or the owner of a sprawling excavation outfit, an expected bill for thousands of dollars can be crippling to your business.

This is the situation Pete had just experienced when he rolled into Missouri Farm Bureau Insurance agent Jess's office in 2006. Pete, the owner of dozens of residential rental properties throughout Missouri, had just experienced a phenomenon that anyone who owns a single roof - home or auto - dreads: a devastating hail storm.

"Pete wasn't insured with Missouri Farm Bureau Insurance at the time of the storm," Jess says. "Judging by the number of referrals he's sent our way since switching over, I'd say he wishes he had been!"

The hail had damaged nearly 70 of Pete’s properties. But the ball of ice sitting in Pete's stomach wasn't from hail. No, that came from all the deductibles he had to pay due to the way his former commercial insurance plan had been set up. For someone with so many individual properties, a per-property deductible is not ideal, especially in a place where hail or other wide-ranging weather issues are common. For Pete, this meant a total bill that was close to $70,000. This meant refinancing multiple properties to be able to fix the others.

"Missouri Farm Bureau Insurance is one of the only companies to offer a per-occurrence deductible," Jess says. "It seems like someone at Pete's old agency should have discussed the details with him so he knew what he could potentially be facing." If he'd been with Missouri Farm Bureau Insurance for this storm, he would have paid one flat deductible instead of 70 separate ones, a savings of multiple thousands of dollars.

In the property-rental business, margins are always tight. A single blown water heater can be the difference between profit and deficit in any given year for any given property. Landlords (and any business owner, for that matter) have a lot on their plates, a lot to worry about. They shouldn't have to worry about affording the deductible when Mother Nature loses her temper. They shouldn’t have to worry about the details. That's what your insurance agent is for.

"My job is to limit the unforeseen for my clients," Jess says. "If you're calling your agent, chances are something unforeseen has already happened. We don't need to be adding to that with huge bills because your policy isn't right for your business. The amount of money you can save in cases like Pete's can make the difference between staying in business or closing up shop."

In Pete's case, it's not just expenses. It's customer service. When you run as many properties as he does, of course you're going to run into expensive fixes and sudden costly circumstances. It comes with the territory of being in business for yourself. But that's also why you need someone on the other end looking out for you.

And now that Pete is with Jess and Missouri Farm Bureau Insurance, he finally has it. View all stories