After years of being told that multifamily insurance only moves in one direction, owners are seeing something different in 2026. Brokers are cutting property premiums by 10 to 30 percent for well-run, hardened buildings. The reduction is real, but it is not evenly available. Carriers are increasingly separating good operators from bad ones and pricing each accordingly.
That shift reframes insurance as something many owners still treat as a finance line item. Ron Kutas, Chief Executive Officer of OneWall Communities, argues that the premium is better understood as an output of day-to-day operations.
Carriers are pricing the operator, not just the asset
The core change Kutas is seeing is that insurers now delineate between operators. A building run by an owner who inspects, documents, and maintains is a different risk than the same building run by an absentee owner, and carriers are underwriting that difference.
He is more skeptical of a second trend: creative structures that spread risk across a larger pool to win a lower headline price, a product that was common a decade ago and has resurfaced. The savings can be real, but the fine print often is not read carefully, particularly around limits and where deductibles land depending on the claim. He treats those arrangements as a form of financial engineering rather than a substitute for being a lower-risk operator.
The premium is set by how the property is run
The clearest illustration in Kutas’s experience involves a property that was not his. A neighboring building relied on residents to report missing or broken smoke detectors and fire extinguishers rather than inspecting units directly. When the fire marshal conducted the annual inspection, many were missing or not working. The distressed owner did not fix them inside the 30 days given, lost the fire certificate, and watched insurance costs jump as the property fell out of compliance. The whole sequence unfolded in roughly 60 days.
OneWall inspects every unit, not only on turnover but during preventative maintenance visits such as HVAC service. Kutas cannot point to a single hard number that isolates the savings, but the carriers know how the firm operates, and that operating profile lowers the risk they are pricing.
Filing fewer claims, on purpose
A second operational lever is claims discipline. OneWall investigates incidents before deciding whether to file, rather than passing everything to the carrier and letting insurance fight it out. When an attorney’s letter arrives over a slip and fall, the first step is checking the record. In one case, camera footage showed the claimant was not on the property at the stated date and time, which ended the matter before it became a claim.
Larger organizations, Kutas notes, often file reflexively to avoid the work of investigating, and sometimes out of concern that handling an incident themselves could jeopardize coverage. A lower claims history, built deliberately, is one of the strongest things an operator can show at renewal.
Making the case to the underwriter
Softening premiums are not automatic. Kutas treats the quoting process as a negotiation that requires competition and questions, not just three quotes and the cheapest choice. Owners who ask why one carrier prices higher than another, and what specifically drives the risk assessment, can sometimes correct the record.
In one instance, OneWall was quoted a higher premium tied to a shooting the underwriter believed had occurred on the property. The team was unaware of any such incident, looked into it, and found the carrier had relied on a news article that misreported the location. A police report confirmed it had nothing to do with the property, and the carrier adjusted once shown the evidence. Without knowing what the underwriter is looking at, an owner cannot have that conversation at all.
Locking in the benefit while it lasts
The operational habits that lower a premium, unit inspections, documented incident investigation, and visible maintenance, are the same habits that carry the building through the next hardening. For owners who did the work, the reward is a lower number now. For those who did not, as Kutas puts it, the cost arrives sooner or later. With carriers expected to price more tightly again as reinsurance repositions, the window favors operators who can already prove how they run.
About the Expert: Ron Kutas is Chief Executive Officer of OneWall Communities, a vertically integrated multifamily owner-operator that provides third-party management services. He works in workforce housing and Class B multifamily operations across the Northeast and Sunbelt.
