The consensus in the marketplace is that insurers sold only a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half, brownfields insurance policies last year. But insurers keep coming to market with more and more coverages. The number of different environmental coverages sold by different insurers ranges between 100 and 150. The pattern is that the marketplace for environmental insurance coverage is chock full of sellers who sense that buyers need help but can't get them to part with premium dollars. There's a lot of activity in the marketplace, but sellers do all the talking.
Buyers just listen.
Still, it's a good bet that all the talk will give rise to action at some point. Insurers believe that listeners will become buyers once they understand that they must shift the risk of environmental mishap from their own shoulders. Joe Boren, chief operating officer of Commerce and Industry in New York, says the activity in the marketplace already means premium flow for his company. But now, as big industrial companies 'package' contaminated properties that they want to get off the balance sheet or do something else with, some of the things we sell have an appeal, and we're finding ourselves talking to a market that was traditionally hard to penetrate. And through the 1980s and into the 1990s, we had products for the middle and smaller market.