Keeping your clients resilient against water damage and escaped liquids

Escaped liquids are one of the top risks facing your commercial property clients. Liquid damage is the number one cause of losses in the sector, our proprietary data reveals. It was responsible for 58% of losses in finished facilities between 2012 and 2022.

But your clients don’t need to wait until they have water dripping from their ceiling before they act. There’s a host of preventative and early detection solutions available to property owners that are cost-effective, easy to install, and customizable based on their specific needs.

Making your clients aware of these a great way to deepen your relationships with them. Through helping them identify and implement the best risk mitigation measures for their needs, you can position yourself as a strategic partner and help them keep their loss histories clean by avoiding preventable losses.

Solutions for mitigating escaped liquid risks

Through rigorous testing at our research campus, FM Approvals has identified a range of proven, low-cost solutions that businesses can deploy to spot, catch, and fix potential leaks early. These include:

These can be laid on the floor in high-risk areas, such as in data centers or in mechanical or utility rooms. When their outer membrane becomes saturated, this triggers an alarm system that will alert staff to a potential problem—and in some case help to pinpoint the precise location of the leak.

These sensors are typically used to detect water at a localized point. They may also be used to detect rising water levels. They can be fitted at the required level on a wall or surface and will alert facility staff if a leak is detected.

Fitting these valves on stopcocks enables teams to ensure that action is taken to stop any leak the instant it is detected. Solutions can be tailored to shut off the water for an entire facility, a single floor, or even a single room—as may be applicable in a hotel or apartment complex.

We also recommend encouraging your clients to develop and implement a domestic water emergency response plan (DWERP). This will include critical information for guiding crisis responses, such as where facility stopcocks are located and who on staff knows how to turn them off.

How to protect and add value for your clients

The best risk mitigation techniques for your clients will depend on their needs and the characteristics of their properties. FM Affiliated partners with brokers and their clients to design solutions tailored based on these criteria.

Our engineers can help you identify the right FM Approved solutions for a given use case and ensure they are installed correctly. We can also support your clients in developing their DWERP plan, providing resources and support as needed.

Partnering with us in this way can do more than mitigate risks. It can also unlock new opportunities for value creation. For example, when one hotel operator installed water flow detection equipment in their facilities, they also discovered that the data these systems generate could be used to significantly reduce water usage and unlock ongoing cost savings.

If you have a client you think could benefit from our loss prevention expertise in their area, we’d love to hear from you. Submit a new business enquiry here and we’ll be in touch ASAP.

This is part of a series of articles FM is producing to help brokers understand the value we can provide to their commercial property insurance clients. Look out for the next post in this series for more valuable insights.