If You Ever Had a Security Measure and Removed It, Read This Bisnow published a piece this week on landlords getting sued more than ever. Worth reading. It got me digging into the numbers, and the picture is worse than the article makes it sound. Before the pandemic, multifamily insurance averaged about $30 per unit per month. By late 2023, RealPage put it at $65. In West Palm Beach, $150. That’s $1,800 per unit per year. For a 200-unit property, a $360,000 annual insurance bill before you fix a single toilet. At a 5.5 cap, every $100,000 in premium increase destroys $1.8 million in property value. Insurance isn’t just an expense line. That’s equity gone. Nuclear verdicts are driving the severity. In 2024, 135 jury verdicts exceeded $10 million. Total value: $31.3 billion. The median hit $51 million, up from $21 million four years earlier. Forty-nine topped $100 million. Five crossed a billion. One case worth knowing. In Georgia, a jury awarded almost $43 million to a man shot in a pharmacy parking lot. The Supreme Court upheld it and found the pharmacy 95% at fault. Employees had testified the lot was unsafe. The business had hired security guards but cut them to save money. If you ever had a security measure and removed it, you’ve created a paper trail plaintiff attorneys will use to argue you knew about the danger and walked away. The litigation economics have shifted in ways most owners don’t appreciate. ATRA counted $2.5 billion spent on 27 million legal ads in 2024. A year later, their estimate hit $4 billion. Morgan & Morgan alone spends $350 million annually. Those ads don’t just recruit plaintiffs. They condition jurors. When you see “you deserve millions” on every highway billboard for years, that number starts to feel reasonable in a deliberation room. Behind the advertising sits a $19 billion industry most property owners have never heard of: third-party litigation funding. Institutional investors bankroll lawsuits in exchange for a share of the verdict. Returns estimated at 20-30% annually. There is now professional capital with a financial incentive to generate more lawsuits, bigger awards, and longer fights. For mid-market multifamily, most admitted carriers have left. WTW said it plainly: most won’t consider a habitational schedule because of expected loss activity. NMHC found 61% of owners increased deductibles in the last three years just to keep premiums flat. A third had carriers limit or reduce coverage. One thing is working. Tort reform. Florida passed reforms in 2023 and dropped from #2 for nuclear verdicts to #10 in a single year. Georgia’s 2025 package went further: bifurcated trials, phantom damages eliminated, litigation funder registration where failure to register is a felony. The most expensive security guard could be the one you used to have. https://lnkd.in/eRmiuy8X