Jones COI Alternative: Why Real Estate Teams Are Switching to Bramble

Jones has raised $38 million and built a platform with strong traction in real estate and construction. If you're a property manager or general contractor who needs to collect COIs from tenants and subcontractors, Jones delivers a polished, purpose-built experience for that workflow.

The problem is what happens after the collection.

Jones confirms that a COI exists, that it hasn't expired, and that it meets generic coverage thresholds. What it doesn't do is read your actual lease or your subcontract insurance exhibit - the documents where your real, negotiated requirements live.

That distinction is worth examining carefully, because it's exactly where compliance gaps go undetected.

Jones's Strengths in Real Estate and Construction

Jones was built with RE and construction in mind, and it shows. The vendor onboarding experience is smooth. Tenant and subcontractor portals make it easy for counterparties to submit documents. The dashboard provides portfolio-level visibility that appeals to property management companies and GCs managing dozens or hundreds of relationships.

Jones also offers compliance scoring and rejection workflows - vendors submitting COIs that don't meet defined thresholds get flagged and prompted to resubmit. This is meaningfully better than pure manual review.

For teams coming from spreadsheets or generic document management tools, Jones is a significant operational upgrade.

Where Jones Falls Short: The Contract Gap

Here's what Jones doesn't do: it doesn't read your lease.

Commercial leases contain highly specific insurance requirements. A typical lease insurance exhibit might require:

• $3 million combined single limit commercial general liability
• $5 million umbrella/excess
• Workers' compensation at statutory limits
• Tenant's property insurance at full replacement cost
• Landlord entity named as additional insured on a primary and non-contributory basis
• Waiver of subrogation in favor of landlord
• 30-day notice of cancellation

Jones can check whether a COI is "current." It cannot verify whether the COI satisfies every one of those specific lease requirements - because it hasn't read the lease.

The same problem exists in construction. Subcontract insurance exhibits are detailed. Limits vary by trade, project phase, and contractual risk allocation. A platform that applies generic thresholds misses the clause-level specificity that determines actual compliance.

Industry data confirms the scale of the problem: 70% of COIs are non-compliant at first receipt. If your verification system can't detect clause-level deficiencies, most of that non-compliance goes undetected.

What Bramble Does Differently

Bramble reads both documents: your lease or subcontract, and the COI submitted against it.

When a tenant or subcontractor submits a certificate, Bramble's AI extracts the insurance requirements from your actual contract documents - specific limits, policy types, endorsement language, additional insured requirements, cancellation notice provisions - and compares them against the COI line by line.

The result is a compliance gap report that tells you exactly what's missing. Not "this COI doesn't meet thresholds" - specifically: "Umbrella/excess coverage is $2M against a $5M lease requirement. Additional insured endorsement is on a contributory basis; lease requires primary and non-contributory."

This is the difference between collection and compliance. Jones does the former. Bramble does both.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Capability	Jones	Bramble
COI collection & storage	Yes	Yes
Expiration tracking	Yes	Yes
Tenant/vendor portal	Yes	Yes
RE/construction focus	Yes	Yes (and others)
Reads source lease/contract	No	Yes
Extracts negotiated requirements	No	Yes
Clause-level gap analysis	No	Yes
Additional insured language check	Generic	Contract-specific
Waiver of subrogation verification	No	Yes
Umbrella/excess stacking verification	No	Yes

A Real Scenario: 150-Unit Commercial Portfolio

A commercial property owner with 150 tenants uses Jones to collect COIs. Renewal reminders fire automatically. New tenant onboarding is smooth. The portfolio dashboard shows 150 green statuses.

Underneath that green dashboard: 40 tenants whose leases require $3M in GL but whose COIs show $1M. 25 tenants who haven't properly endorsed the landlord entity as additional insured. 15 tenants with umbrella policies that don't follow form to the GL.

Jones doesn't surface any of this because Jones hasn't read the leases.

Bramble reads the leases. The same portfolio shows 80 compliant tenants and 70 flagged for specific, correctable deficiencies.

The gap between those two dashboards is the gap between actual compliance and the appearance of compliance. When an uninsured incident occurs - slip and fall, property damage, third-party claim - that gap costs $500,000 or more.

Construction-Specific Considerations

For general contractors and construction managers, the stakes are even higher.

Subcontract insurance exhibits are negotiated instruments. Limits are set based on the scope of work, risk allocation, and project-specific requirements. A roofing subcontractor's coverage requirements differ from a mechanical subcontractor's. Change orders can affect risk profiles.

Jones applies a compliance framework to COI collection. Bramble reads the actual subcontract exhibit for each trade, extracts the applicable requirements, and compares against the submitted COI.

When a subcontractor has an incident on your site, the question your insurer will ask is not whether you collected a COI - it's whether the coverage on that COI met the contractual requirements you established. That answer lives in the subcontract, not in a generic threshold engine.

Operational Migration: What Switching Looks Like

For teams coming from Jones to Bramble, the migration is primarily about enabling the contract-reading layer. Your existing COI workflows - collection, vendor communication, expiration tracking - continue. Bramble adds the contract ingestion step that turns collection into verification.

Most teams connect their existing contract repository (typically a folder structure, lease management system, or construction management platform) and Bramble indexes the relevant insurance exhibits. New contracts and renewals feed into the same pipeline.

The compliance gap reports surface immediately, and most teams find material findings within the first week of running their existing portfolio through the comparison engine.

Who Should Choose Jones

Jones is the right choice if:

• Your primary need is operational: you need a better way to collect and store COIs
• Your insurance requirements are simple and uniform across your portfolio
• You need a purpose-built vendor portal experience
• You don't have contract documents with specific insurance exhibits

Jones's RE/construction focus and polished UX make it a strong operational tool for teams that haven't yet standardized contract-level insurance requirements.

Who Should Choose Bramble

Bramble is the right choice if:

• Your leases or subcontracts contain specific, negotiated insurance requirements
• You want clause-level verification, not just collection confirmation
• You've had coverage gap discoveries after incidents
• Your legal team has invested time in crafting specific insurance exhibits
• Your portfolio includes tenants or subs with varying coverage requirements by contract

If you have contracts with teeth, you need a platform that reads them.

The Bottom Line

Jones is a COI collection platform with strong RE and construction UX. Bramble is a Document Compliance Intelligence platform that reads your actual contracts and verifies COIs against them.

Collection confirms a document exists. Compliance confirms the document satisfies your contractual requirements. For commercial real estate and construction, those are not the same thing.

Find out what your current COIs are missing. Book a demo at getbramble.com and we'll run your lease portfolio through a live comparison.