Our story
PBI Group was founded by Paul Bondy and Chris Dittes in Arlington, Virginia with a simple thesis: residential real estate brokerages are underserved by generalist insurance agents. The professional liability market for agents and brokers is small enough that most P&C agencies treat it as a side-of-desk product. The result is policies that look the same on the surface — but respond very differently when a claim hits.
We took the opposite approach. From day one we picked one specialty and went deep. We learned the carriers, learned the policy forms, learned the claim patterns. We built relationships with Palomar Specialty Insurance Company — an A-rated California carrier focused on real estate — and a handful of Lloyd's syndicates that write the strongest real estate E&O forms on the market. And we hired and trained a team that does nothing but real estate insurance.
Where we add value
For a small brokerage, online portals and franchise-bundled policies often work fine. The risks are low and the policy is mostly a checkbox for the franchise agreement.
For everyone else — every brokerage with more than ~10 agents, every property management firm, every brokerage that wants the policy to actually respond when there's a claim — there's a real difference between a policy placed by someone who understands the business and a policy placed by someone reading a script. Our agents have placed thousands of these policies. They've seen the claims. They know which coverage gaps matter and which are theoretical.
Our promise
We will never be the cheapest E&O policy on the market. There are online portals that will sell you a $300/year policy with $1M limits and three pages of exclusions. If price is the only thing that matters, those work fine until a claim arrives.
What we offer is the policy that actually responds. Genuinely broad coverage on the claims you're most likely to face — failure to advise, fair housing, property condition disclosures, wire fraud — placed by an agent who knows your business, backed by a team that handles your renewal in under 30 minutes a year. That's been the bargain since day one and it's why over 95% of our brokerage clients renew with us every year.
