Your policy says covered. The payout says maybe. The Wall Street Journal ran the math. The five biggest home insurers paid nothing on nearly half the claims they closed last year. Ten years ago that number sat near a third. Before you reach for a villain, look at why a claim pays zero. The deductible climbed past the damage, the peril got excluded, or the claim got filed by phone and pulled back before it paid. The gap between “I have insurance” and “I got paid” grew, and the reasons sit in the policy you already signed. It reads like a homeowner problem. The same forces hit commercial and multifamily, only bigger. What we thought was “insurance” has changed. Deductibles went up. On apartments, way up. HUD lets the wind or named-storm deductible on its multifamily loans run to the greater of $50,000 or 5% of insured value, capped at $475,000 per event. You can eat six figures before coverage kicks in. Exclusions got wider. One of my properties is Class A student housing with a dog park on site. I didn’t catch the gap myself. The premium felt high, I asked for a second opinion, and that review found we had no coverage for dog bites. A dog park on the property, and the exact risk it raises was carved out. That is the kind of exclusion sitting in a policy you think you understand. And if a denial is wrong, you have less room to fight it. Florida ended one-way attorney fees and assignment of benefits in 2022 and 2023. That cut what a wrong denial costs the insurer and raised what it costs you to fight one. Change the math on a behavior and you change how often it happens. For an owner this is an underwriting input, not a gripe. The premium bleeds NOI every year. The uncovered loss hits your balance sheet the year the storm lands. You carry a thicker slice of the risk than the premium suggests. The sharpest version is a clause you’ve probably never read. Anti-concurrent causation. Wind is covered. Flood is not. A hurricane brings both. In states that enforce the clause, the carrier can deny a loss the two perils caused together. A Galveston apartment complex found this out after Hurricane Ike. The Texas Supreme Court backed the denial of its rebuild costs even though wind alone might have been enough to cause them. Enforcement varies, so step one is knowing where your state lands. So before the next storm, read the policy, not the dec page. The clause hides in the preamble, above the exclusions list. Are you really covered? https://lnkd.in/eyUVNsJs