Multifamily owners have spent the last several years pouring capital into resilience, in the form of hardened roofs, backup power and fortified building envelopes, to name a few. The logic is sound. Safer buildings should mean lower risk, and lower risk should mean better pricing at renewal.
Executive Summary
Multifamily owners have spent years hardening properties, but most carriers still lack a consistent way to price that resilience into premiums. Here, Brandon Tobman, CEO of GetCovered, a risk and compliance platform of multifamily property owners, covers why per-unit insurance costs have climbed sharply since 2020, why proven resilience data (like FORTIFIED-roof outcomes after Hurricane Sally) still isn't reaching underwriting models, and what a documentation-first standard could look like for carriers ready to close the resilience-underwriting gap.
In practice, however, that’s often not what happens. At the 2026 ULI Resilience Summit in Nashville, insurers and housing operators converged on an uncomfortable diagnosis: the industry has no consistent mechanism for translating a building’s resilience into a lower premium. Owners are doing the work and underwriters, in most cases, simply aren’t seeing it.
That’s the blind spot. And as premiums climb further into hard-market territory, it’s an increasingly expensive one to leave unaddressed.
A Cost Curve That Keeps Bending the Wrong Way
The scale of the problem is no longer subtle. Federal Reserve research on apartment building loan data shows real, inflation-adjusted insurance costs per unit rose roughly 51% between 2020 and 2024 alone.
