Property Management
The Vendor Was Insured When You Hired Them
Property managers collect a certificate of insurance before a vendor sets foot on site, file it, and move on. The certificate expires twelve months later. The vendor does not stop showing up, and nothing in the process notices. Here is where the gap opens and how to close it.
The onboarding is the part everyone does well. A new landscaping company wants the contract, so they send over a certificate of insurance. Somebody checks the general liability limit, checks the workers' compensation coverage, checks that the management company is named as additional insured, and files it. The vendor starts work.
Twelve months later the policy period on that certificate ends.
The landscaping crew shows up the following Monday exactly as they did the week before. The gate code still works. The invoice still gets paid. Nothing in the operation changes, because nothing in the operation is looking at a date on a PDF in a folder.
This is not a story about bad vendors. Most of them renewed their policy on time and simply never thought to send you the new certificate, because nobody asked.
Verification is an event; coverage is a state
The whole problem sits in that sentence. The process treats insurance as something you confirm once, at the start of a relationship. The risk it is protecting against is continuous.
A certificate of insurance is a snapshot. It says a policy existed with certain limits on the day it was issued. It says nothing about next March. If the vendor changes carriers, reduces limits, or drops the additional-insured endorsement at renewal, the certificate in your file does not update itself and does not notify you.
So there are two failure modes, and only one of them is visible. The obvious one is a vendor working with genuinely lapsed coverage. The quieter one, which is probably more common, is a vendor who is properly insured under terms that no longer match what your contract requires - lower limits, a different endorsement, a change in the named entity after they restructured.
You find out about either one at the worst possible moment, which is after something has happened on your property.
Why the spreadsheet does not hold
Plenty of management companies do keep a tracker. It usually stops working for reasons that have nothing to do with discipline.
- The dates are all different. Vendor policies renew on their own anniversaries, not yours. Thirty vendors means thirty unrelated dates scattered across the year.
- The certificate arrives as a PDF attached to an email. Getting the expiration date into the tracker requires a person to open it, read it, and type it somewhere. That step is where trackers go stale.
- Chasing is nobody's job in particular. A month before expiry someone has to email the vendor and ask for the updated certificate, then check that the one they send actually meets the requirement rather than just filing it.
- Portfolios change hands. Properties get added, vendors get inherited, and the tracker reflects whoever last had time to maintain it.
Industry surveys on how many vendors are working with expired or non-compliant certificates report figures that vary widely depending on who is asking and how they count, and I would treat any specific number with caution. What is consistent is the direction: when management companies actually audit, they find more gaps than they expected.
The vendor file has a second date in it
Worth noticing, because most trackers only hold one: the certificate has an expiration date, and the service agreement underneath it has a renewal date and a notice period. They are rarely the same, and they need different actions.
The certificate date needs a chase - contact the vendor, get the replacement, verify it still meets the requirement.
The contract date needs a decision - continue at the new rate, renegotiate, or give notice. And that decision has a deadline earlier than the renewal, because the notice period runs backwards from it. A landscaping agreement with a sixty-day notice period and a 1 April renewal is decided by the end of January, whatever the invoice says in March.
Most operators track the first and are surprised by the second, usually in the form of a rate increase that took effect before anyone realized there had been an opportunity to discuss it.
A version that survives contact with a real portfolio
- One row per vendor, not per property. A vendor working across six sites has one insurance position, and duplicating it across six rows guarantees the copies disagree.
- Record both dates. Certificate expiration and contract renewal, in separate columns, because they trigger different work.
- Set the reminder before the date, not on it. Forty-five days for a certificate chase; the full notice period for a contract decision.
- Write down what the requirement actually is. Limits and endorsements, per vendor category. Without it, verification degrades into checking that a certificate exists rather than checking that it is sufficient.
- Give the chase to a named person and make the absence of a renewed certificate visible rather than silent.
Renewly handles the contract half of that list: it reads your vendor agreements, pulls out the renewal date and the notice period, works out the last day you can act, and tells you before it passes. It is a contract system rather than an insurance-compliance platform - if you need certificate verification workflows specifically, there are dedicated tools for that, and they solve a different problem from this one.
Founder of Renewly. Over a decade in IT operations and vendor management across financial services and technology. LinkedIn