Property and casualty insurance agents and brokers could offer even greater value and service to their commercial lines clients if they offered cost segregation services.
P&C agents and brokers are talking with commercial building owners on a regular basis about their insurance needs. Inevitably their client base owns commercial buildings and perhaps some multi-family, short-term rentals and rental homes. It’s an easy conversation to have with a business owner whom you know owns a building because you are either insuring it or you are hoping to win his business and insure it going forward. As part of that conversation, why not ask, “BTW, have you done cost segregation on your building for tax savings?” That’s it. If they have done it, great, but if the response is like what I find about 8 out of 10 times the owner hasn’t and he knows little to nothing about it. It’s then just a matter of, we’ll have our guy run an estimate for you and you can then run it past your tax advisor to see if this might be something you can utlize. On average, building owners save between $30,000 – $70,000 per $1 million in basis or building costs.
You can then reach out to me with the specifics on the building because you likely have it in your database already. Many times I can look up most buildings, but we need the following:
- Address
- Building type
- Date of Purchase or In-Service Date
- Purchase Price
- Land Value (est)
- Improvements – year / type
Within a day or two, we will turn around a custom estimate for this owner to save on his/her income taxes. Many times the building owners will see a return something in the neighborhood of 10x what they will invest in the study. Meaning, let’s say the study costs $5,000. The owner’s tax rate is 32%. His net cost after tax would be $3,400. If he saves $50,000 on his income taxes, that’s an ROI of 14:1 or 1,400% return on his investment in the study.
As a property and casualty insurance agent or broker, we’ll do a revenue share of 10% on our study fees. That $5,000 study will generate $500 for your agency. This would likely be for a $1-$1.5MM building. Smaller buildings have smaller fees. Bigger buildings would have bigger fees. How many buildings does your agency insure? If my experience is that about 8 out of 10 are unware of this tax application, don’t you see how you could be a big help to these building owners to help them save on taxes, increase cash flow and maybe help them stay in business?
Lastly, I have heard that insurance premiums for commercial lines have gone up 15-25% in the past year. What if you had a solution to help that business owner when you call him to discuss his renewal for the upcoming year and you’re concerned about possibly losing a client because his rates are going to jump by thousands of dollars. Well, this might be a solution. He might have a building or two that he has not done a cost segregation study on that might generate lots of tax savings which could afford him the cash flow to more easily pay for the increased insurance premium.
And when your agents are on the phone prospecting talking about insurance, this is a another way to try to engage the building owner. Who knows…maybe he’s not ready to buy insurance from you just yet but he does cost segregation because you introduced it to him. Perhaps that will engender some favortism toward you when he does go to re-evaluate or renew his insurance coverages in the coming year.
Cost segregation is a terrific value-add service for property and casualty agents and brokers. It’s a great way to help your clients and to differentiate yourself from the competition. On top of that, it’s an additional revenue opportunity for the agent and agency. Reach out if you’d like to discuss. I work all across the U.S. in all 50 states. One does not need to be licensed to offer cost segregation. John Murphy 864-276-1448.
The views expressed are my own. I do not speak or write in any official capacity for the firm I represent in cost segregation – CSSI, LLC
