What insurance does a senior housing REIT lease usually require?

The insurance exhibit is the schedule attached to a lease listing every coverage, limit, and endorsement the landlord requires. It is negotiated once, at signing, and then governs for the entire lease term while your insurance program renews annually around it.

Drift is the normal outcome rather than the exception. A market change alters an endorsement, a limit moves, a deductible increases, and nobody rereads a document signed years earlier. Then a refinancing, a sale, or a landlord insurance audit surfaces the mismatch.

Additional insured status. The exhibit typically names the landlord, its lender, and its property manager, and often requires coverage at least as broad as a specified endorsement form. The common failure is a blanket endorsement on your policy that extends status only where required by written contract and only for your own negligence, which may or may not satisfy what the exhibit demands, and which frequently omits the lender and manager.

Waiver of subrogation. Usually mutual, and it has to be endorsed on both the property and the workers compensation policies. The workers compensation one is the one most often forgotten, because it sits with a different market on a different renewal date.

Primary and non-contributory. This decides whether the landlord insurer participates in defense or stands back entirely. It travels with additional insured status and gets missed in the same way.

Per location aggregate. Landlords frequently require it so that claims at a building they do not own cannot exhaust the limits protecting the one they do. If the lease says per location and your policy carries a shared aggregate, you are in breach from day one of the term.

A certificate of insurance is an informational document. It confers no coverage, it does not amend the policy, and it does not tell anyone what the underlying endorsement actually says.

Compliance means the endorsements exist and say what the exhibit requires. So the working document is not the certificate, it is a copy of each required endorsement, checked against the exhibit language, with the named entities verified against the entities the lease names.

Build one schedule with a row for every requirement in every exhibit that binds you, lease, loan, management agreement, bond covenant, and a column for what your current program actually provides. Refresh it at every renewal.

The administrative benefit is obvious. The less obvious benefit is that this exercise reliably surfaces genuine coverage gaps, because counterparties tend to require the things that matter. A landlord asking for a per location aggregate is asking for something you would want anyway.

Primary and non-contributory is negotiable, and agreeing to it means your program absorbs the full defense of claims where the landlord may share fault. That is worth raising at the lease negotiation, not at the first claim.

So is any requirement for an admitted carrier or a stated financial strength rating, which can conflict directly with what the senior care market will actually offer, since much of this class is written in surplus lines. Discovering that conflict before signature is far cheaper than discovering it at the first renewal after.