COI tracking for real estate

The vendors real estate owners & investors rely on

Real estate work leans on project-based and turnover vendors that change from deal to deal:

• General and specialty renovation contractors
• Turnover cleaners, painters, and make-ready crews
• Home inspectors and environmental testers
• Stagers, photographers, and showing services
• Landscapers and exterior-maintenance vendors

The specific risk

For real estate owners the exposure is the asset itself. A contractor’s uninsured fire, water, or fall claim can encumber the property, trigger a lender default, and pierce a thin LLC. Because real estate vendors rotate constantly — a different contractor on every flip — the discipline of collecting and verifying a COI before releasing keys is easy to skip and expensive to skip. Lenders and hazard carriers increasingly ask for proof that contractors on the property were insured.

On a flip, your rehab contractor’s helper falls off a ladder. You reach for their COI and realize you never actually collected one — you took their word that they were “fully insured.” Without workers’ comp and with your LLC never named additional insured, the injury claim reaches through to the property and to you personally, and your hazard carrier starts asking whether the contractor was covered at all.

Insurance requirements that matter

What real estate owners and investors typically require before a contractor starts work:

Common mistakes to avoid

• Taking a contractor’s “I’m insured” at face value instead of collecting and reading the actual certificate.
• Listing your name personally rather than the correct owning LLC as certificate holder and additional insured.
• Reusing an old certificate from a previous deal without checking it’s still in force for this property.

Automate it with CoverGuard

Investors juggling several deals rarely have a system for this — certificates live in an email thread until something goes wrong. CoverGuard gives each contractor a one-link upload, reads the ACORD 25 to confirm the LLC is named and the limits are met, and tracks expirations across every property so no crew works on an uninsured basis.

For the fundamentals, read the complete COI tracking guide or the step-by-step guide to tracking subcontractor COIs. You can also generate recommended requirements with the free COI requirements checklist tool.