An Adelaide landlord says insurers will not cover his Hindley Street property because it is too risky, and premiums for his tenant's business have more than quadrupled.
Key points:
- A Hindley Street landlord says insurers have refused to cover his property
- The Australian Hotels Association says insurers are asking many applicants to pay for a risk assessment
- The association says country pubs are also struggling to get insurance
Alex Radda owns the building where he used to lease a cocktail bar.
He said his tenant was being slugged hard.
"They're paying around about $13,000 a year for their business insurance, where as we were paying $3,000," he said.
"That's a really big jump in the space of, [let's say], 12 months."
Mr Radda said no-one wanted to insure his building because it was on Hindley Street.
"We've been told by various brokers and people in the insurance game that Hindley Street has just been assessed as too high [of a] risk," he said.
He said the only exceptions were businesses operating during usual business hours.
Mr Radda said insurers offered little explanation for declining to sell cover and he felt they were "geographically discriminating".
"If you're in a profitable business, you have to take the good with the bad, you can't just sort of cherrypick and just say, 'No, we only want the policies that are always going to be 100 per cent profitable,'" he said.
Insurers will not cover country buildings
Australian Hotels Association chief executive Ian Horne said Hindley Street licencees were not the only ones finding it hard to secure insurance.
Mr Horne said country pubs struggled to get cover because insurers saw many as a fire risk due to their age.
"There's only a relative handful of major insurance companies and they simply are saying, 'We're not prepared to take the risk,'" he said.
Mr Horne said it had been an issue for pub and hotel operators outside Adelaide since about 2018.
He said insurers also wanted applicants to pay for a risk assessment at their own cost.
"A number of insurance companies will only even consider quoting if there's been a full risk analysis done by an external third party at the costs to the tenant," Mr Horne said.
He said it was a harsh reality that insurers could pick and choose who to cover in a global market and in the absence of a state government insurance commission.
The ABC has asked the Insurance Council of Australia to respond to Mr Radda's comments.