Apartment owners want a number, and every honest broker gives the same frustrating answer first: the cost per unit varies more than almost any other line of commercial insurance, because two buildings with identical unit counts can price 3x apart. What is useful is knowing exactly which variables move that number, and what the 2026 market is doing to each half of your program. Because right now, property and liability are moving in opposite directions — and that is the whole story of your renewal.
Why is my property premium falling while my total cost goes up?
Because they are two different markets, and only one of them is soft.
Marsh’s Global Insurance Market Index for the second quarter of 2026 reports that global commercial insurance rates fell 6% — the eighth consecutive quarter of reductions. Within that: property rates declined 12%, while casualty rates rose 2% globally and 7% in the United States.
Lockton’s February 2026 Real Estate and Hospitality Market Update says the same thing in habitational terms. Property capacity for the habitational class “remains abundant,” and multifamily assets, especially in catastrophe-prone locations, “are receiving rate cuts.” Specifically:
- On wood frame or superior construction with improvements, property rates for ground-up coverage are down 5% to 15% at renewal.
- Reductions of 20% to 30% are available on shared and layered property placements.
Meanwhile: “The casualty insurance market remains a challenge for habitational assets, with insurers seeking rate increases, higher self-insured retentions, compressed limits, and tighter terms.” Lockton notes most retail insurers have exited multifamily altogether, with wholesale and new entrants picking up the appetite, and says softening on the casualty side “does not appear to be on the horizon in the near term.”
So a Texas apartment owner in 2026 can very plausibly see property drop 10%, general liability climb 15%, umbrella capacity shrink, and end up flat or worse on total spend — while reading headlines about a soft market.
What drives the cost per unit on a Texas apartment property?
We are deliberately not publishing a “$X per unit per year” benchmark, because the credible published data does not support a single Texas number and anyone who quotes one to you is guessing. What does hold up is the list of factors underwriters actually rate on, roughly in order of impact:
Construction type and age
Frame construction rates worse than joisted masonry, which rates worse than non-combustible. Age matters through the four systems underwriters ask about every time: roof, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC. A 1978 frame property with original galvanized supply lines and a 22-year-old roof will be quoted by a different set of carriers — often excess and surplus lines rather than admitted — than the same unit count built in 2016.
Catastrophe exposure, and in Texas that means hail
Lockton identifies severe convective storms as the top natural catastrophe loss driver for insurers over the past decade, and notes that severe convective storm activity “tempered property insurers’ appetites for real estate risks in some states, such as Texas and Colorado.” That is the single most Texas-relevant sentence in the 2026 market commentary. Hail is why your wind/hail deductible is a percentage instead of a flat dollar amount, and why that percentage is the number to negotiate before the rate.
Practical note for Central Texas owners: TWIA, the state windstorm association created under Texas Insurance Code Chapter 2210, writes wind and hail coverage in designated coastal counties. Inland properties in Guadalupe and Comal counties are outside that system — your hail exposure runs through the standard or surplus lines market, not TWIA.
Loss history and open claims
Five years of loss runs, and underwriters weight the last two heaviest. Water losses matter out of proportion to their dollar value because they signal deferred maintenance: a pattern of supply-line and water-heater failures reads as a plumbing system that has not been addressed, and it prices like one.
Liability profile: crime scores, security, and habitability
This is where the money is going in 2026. Lockton reports that liability insurers are imposing exclusions on habitational, commercial, and hospitality properties for habitability, assault and battery, firearms, and liquor liability, and that lead umbrella layers of $5 million are now common with some insurers offering only $2 million — $10 million lead layers are “difficult to obtain.” General liability underwriters are explicitly rating on litigation trends in your jurisdiction, crime scores, site security, and regulatory compliance.
Translated: lighting, controlled access, camera coverage, and documented maintenance response times are no longer risk-management nice-to-haves. They are underwriting inputs that decide whether you get an assault and battery sublimit, a full exclusion, or normal coverage.
Subclass
Lockton flags that student housing and lower-income rental assets such as Section 8 and Section 42 properties “are more difficult to place amid insurers’ limited appetite for writing these risks and strict lender requirements.” If you own in one of those subclasses, expect a smaller market and start the renewal earlier.
What will my lender require?
If the property carries agency debt, the loan documents will drive the insurance program more than your preferences will. Lockton notes that habitational lenders backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “typically require SML coverage and self-insured retentions of no more than $25,000 in low-income housing programs.”
Beyond that, the requirements that most commonly cause a closing delay are these: replacement cost valuation with agreed amount or a waiver of coinsurance; business income or rental value coverage for a stated number of months; ordinance or law coverage on older buildings; a cap on the named-storm or wind/hail deductible expressed as a percentage; and the lender named correctly as mortgagee and loss payee. Every one of those is negotiable with the market and non-negotiable with the lender, which is exactly backwards from how most owners approach the renewal. Pull the insurance exhibit from the loan agreement and hand it to your broker before marketing starts, not after the quotes land.
How do I actually lower the number?
Four levers, in the order that usually pays best:
Fix the deductible structure, not just the rate. Moving a wind/hail deductible from 2% to 5% can cut property premium meaningfully, but on a $20 million schedule that is a $1 million retained loss. Model it against your reserves before you take it, and check the lender cap first.
Underwrite your own building before they do. A one-page property narrative with roof replacement dates and documentation, plumbing and electrical updates, water-mitigation devices and leak sensors, security upgrades, and a description of your maintenance ticketing system is the highest-return document in the submission. Carriers are competing for property risks in 2026; give them a reason to choose yours.
Test a layered or shared structure. The published spread between ground-up (down 5–15%) and shared and layered placements (down 20–30%) is large enough that any owner with meaningful total insurable value should have their broker quote both.
Address the casualty side with evidence, not assertions. Since liability is the line that is rising, the ROI on lighting, access control, cameras, and documented habitability response is now measurable in premium, not just in claims avoided.
One caution on statistics: national loss-cause tables you may see cited — including the widely used Insurance Information Institute homeowners data — explicitly exclude Texas and cover owner-occupied homes rather than multifamily. Texas does not look like the national average on weather losses, and apartments do not look like houses. Be skeptical of any apartment cost figure that does not say where it came from.
If you own apartments in Seguin, New Braunfels, or anywhere in Central Texas and want to know whether your renewal reflects the 2026 market or just last year’s number plus inflation, send us the current declarations page, the loss runs, and the lender insurance exhibit. We will tell you which half of your program should be going down and whether it is. Call 830-303-8300 or see our commercial specialties, and our related read on commercial property rates cooling while liability rises in 2026.
