When an uninsured incident hits a commercial property-and eventually, it will-the post-mortem almost always reveals the same failures. The landlord had a COI. They didn't have compliance. Here are the ten mistakes that create that gap, and how to eliminate each one.
Mistake 1: Accepting a COI Without Comparing It to the Lease
The most fundamental error. A COI arrives, it looks like a COI, it gets filed. No one opens the lease and compares the coverage limits, coverage types, and endorsement requirements to what the certificate actually shows.
The result: a tenant carries $1 million in general liability for three years while the lease requires $2 million. When an incident occurs and the tenant's policy pays its $1 million limit, the landlord's insurer covers the remainder-and the landlord faces non-renewal for failing to enforce their own lease.
Fix: Establish a written protocol that every COI must be compared to the lease requirement-line by line-before it is accepted. No exceptions.
Mistake 2: Relying on the Certificate Holder Box as "Additional Insured"
Certificate holders receive cancellation notices. That's all. A landlord whose name appears only in the "certificate holder" box of an ACORD form is not an insured under the policy-they are a notification recipient.
Being an additional insured requires a separate endorsement on the underlying policy. That endorsement must name the landlord's exact legal entity and specify that coverage is primary and non-contributory.
Fix: Require the additional insured endorsement form (CG 20 10, CG 20 11, or equivalent) to be attached to every COI submission. Confirm the endorsement names the correct entity.
Mistake 3: Not Requiring "Primary and Non-Contributory" Language
Even when a proper additional insured endorsement exists, many COIs lack primary and non-contributory language. Without it, if a claim involves both the tenant's policy and the landlord's policy, the two insurers contribute proportionally-which means your insurer pays a share of a claim that should be entirely the tenant's responsibility.
Fix: Add the following to your lease: "Tenant's liability insurance shall be primary and non-contributory with respect to any insurance carried by Landlord, and shall not require contribution from Landlord's insurance."
Mistake 4: Not Verifying the Waiver of Subrogation
A waiver of subrogation prevents the tenant's insurer from suing the landlord after paying a claim. Without it, if a tenant's employee is injured on your property and collects workers' comp, the workers' comp carrier can sue you for contribution.
A checked box on the ACORD form is not a waiver. The waiver must be endorsed onto the policy.
Fix: Require a WOS endorsement on the tenant's CGL and workers' comp policies. Confirm the endorsement is attached to the COI-not just indicated on the certificate face.
Mistake 5: Using a Generic Checklist Instead of the Actual Lease
Many property management teams use a standard COI checklist across their entire portfolio-same minimums, same requirements, for every tenant. The problem: commercial leases are individually negotiated. A restaurant tenant's lease requires different limits than an office tenant's lease. An amended lease may have higher requirements than the original.
Fix: Use the actual executed lease (including all amendments) as the source of requirements for each COI review. Generic checklists are a starting point-they are not a substitute for lease-specific verification.
Mistake 6: Collecting COIs Once and Never Updating
Commercial policies renew annually. A COI collected at lease signing is valid for 12 months. Two years into a five-year lease, many properties have COIs that expired 18 months ago-and no one noticed because no one tracked expirations.
Fix: Log every COI's expiration date at the time of collection. Set calendar reminders at 90, 60, and 30 days before expiration to request renewals. Do not wait for the tenant to volunteer a renewal.
Mistake 7: Accepting Expired COIs for Active Tenants
Closely related to Mistake 6. When a tenant submits an updated COI that turns out to be a reprint of last year's certificate-same dates, same form-some reviewers don't catch it. An expired COI in the file is worse than no COI in some respects: it creates an appearance of due diligence where none exists.
Fix: Check the policy effective and expiration dates on every COI as the first step in review. Immediately flag any COI with an expiration date that has already passed.
Mistake 8: Ignoring the Named Insured Entity
The policy covers the named insured. If the named insured on the COI doesn't match the tenant entity in the lease-because the tenant operates under a different legal entity than they present, or because they abbreviated their name-coverage may not respond to a claim involving the lease entity.
Fix: Verify that the named insured on the COI is the exact legal entity name that signed the lease. If there's any mismatch, contact the broker to confirm coverage applies to the lease entity.
Mistake 9: Not Requiring Completed Operations Coverage
Completed operations coverage protects against liability arising after a contractor finishes work. For tenant improvement projects-where a tenant builds out a space and the work later causes property damage or personal injury-completed operations coverage is critical.
The standard CG 20 10 additional insured endorsement covers ongoing operations only. The CG 20 11 covers both ongoing and completed operations. Many leases don't specify, and many property managers don't know to ask.
Fix: For any tenant that performs tenant improvements, require both ongoing operations AND completed operations additional insured coverage. Specify CG 20 11 or equivalent in the lease.
Mistake 10: No Documented Deficiency Response Process
When a COI deficiency is identified, many property managers send an informal email ("Hey, can you update this?") and then forget about it. There's no tracking, no escalation, no deadline, and no documentation. If an incident occurs during the gap period, there's no record that the landlord even tried to enforce compliance.
Fix: Create a formal deficiency response process: written notice citing the specific lease clause and required value, a deadline of 5-10 business days, an escalation step if not resolved, and full documentation in the tenant file.
The Compliance Failure Pattern
These ten mistakes don't occur randomly. They reflect a systemic problem: most commercial real estate operations treat COI compliance as an administrative task rather than a risk management function. The person responsible for COIs is often an admin coordinator, not a compliance professional-and they're rarely trained on lease interpretation, endorsement forms, or the downstream consequences of each failure type.
The solution is to systematize compliance through clear protocols, specific training, and-at scale-purpose-built tools that read leases and verify COIs automatically.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Which of these mistakes is most likely to result in an uninsured loss? A: Mistakes 1, 2, and 4 (not verifying limits, not verifying additional insured endorsements, and not verifying waiver of subrogation) are the most likely to produce uninsured losses because they affect whether the landlord is actually covered when a claim occurs. The others primarily affect efficiency and audit readiness.
Q: Is there a way to know if our portfolio has these problems right now? A: Run a spot audit: pull five tenant leases and their corresponding COIs. Compare every insurance requirement in the lease to every field on the COI. Check that the additional insured and waiver endorsements are physically attached. The results will tell you how systemic the problem is.
Q: Do courts hold landlords liable for not enforcing their own lease insurance requirements? A: Yes. Courts in several jurisdictions have held that landlords who fail to enforce contractual insurance requirements cannot rely on those requirements as a defense when an incident occurs. Unenforced requirements provide no protection.
Q: How often do these mistakes go undetected until an incident? A: Almost always. Compliance failures in COI programs are invisible until a claim triggers a review. That's what makes them dangerous-there's no feedback loop until the damage is done.
Bramble identifies all ten of these failure modes automatically-reading your lease, reading your COI, and flagging every gap before it becomes a liability.