Environmental Risk Management

Risk management, whether in conjunction with the placement of environmental insurance or not, is often key to the completion of property transfers and other activities. Premier's risk management staff has assisted clients in managing the risk associated with property ownership, property transfer, and merger and acquisition activities. These projects have included providing assistance in the bidding of insurance coverage, managing the selection of insurance brokers, and negotiating coverage and price. In addition, Premier has assisted clients in evaluating the need for insurance and to determine whether self-insurance or other risk management techniques are more cost effective.

The typical insurance management project for Premier includes the development of a Risk Profile for the property. This document is then provided to the transferor's insurance broker to obtain the most appropriate and cost-effective environmental insurance coverage. Development of this document involves the identification of cause-and-effect scenarios and the implementation of a detailed risk-ranking system. The cause-and-effect identification task is counter-balanced with the identification and description of loss-prevention and loss-control techniques that could be implemented by the transferor. A proprietary risk-ranking system is then implemented to summarize the frequency and severity of a potential environmental loss.

These efforts typically result in a property owner being able to satisfy its lender's requirement that future environmental liabilities are controlled by a reliable risk-financing technique, which in turn makes the property more attractive to potential purchasers. This allows the property owner to manage its environmental exposure while retaining a property value much closer to market value for its former industrial property.