Tugboat, a consumer insurance platform offering homeowners and renters claim support, has partnered with Los Angeles-based multifamily investment firm Tower Lane Capital to bring claims expertise to nearly 1,000 residential units across Tower Lane’s portfolio. Every tenant, owner, and property manager now has access to a dedicated claims expert, pre-loss coverage review, and documentation support. It’s a shift from the standard approach where carriers bring adjusters and claims data to a loss, while owners and residents are often left navigating an unfamiliar policy alone.
The partnership follows a wildfire claim in Tower Lane’s portfolio that Tugboat helped reopen and resolve for more than $1 million in additional recovery, after the carrier, manager, and property team had already closed it. That outcome led to embedding claims expertise portfolio-wide rather than waiting for individual losses to trigger a search for help.
We spoke with Anthony Jaffe, CEO at Tower Lane Capital, and Cameron Mooney, CEO of Tugboat, about how the partnership came together, what it changes operationally for owners and property managers, and why they see insurance recovery as a controllable variable rather than a fixed cost of doing business in multifamily.
Nick Pipitone (NP): Who actually pays Tugboat in this deal: Tower Lane, tenants, or a cut of what you recover? Is this a flat per-unit fee, a portfolio license, or contingency-based?
Cameron Mooney (CM): Tower Lane pays. It’s a flat per-unit fee, not contingency-based and not a cut of what we recover. The portfolio gets tools for any loss affecting their buildings, and tenants get membership for losses affecting their units and belongings, plus support preparing for future claims. The agreement also carries a provision that if a loss is large or complex enough to warrant public adjusting services, those come at a discounted rate.
NP: The release cites $15 million recovered across 30 states, averaging $25,000 per claim. How much of that is skewed by large catastrophe claims like the Tower Lane wildfire case versus routine water/theft/liability claims?
CM: The vast majority of claims we support are $50,000 or less. Multiple six-figure claims are much less common. The Tower Lane claim referenced in the release was one of the larger ones we’ve handled, so it sits at the top end of that range rather than the middle.
NP: Does Tugboat’s pre-loss “coverage review” ever catch that a property is underinsured going in, or is the product purely about maximizing recovery after a loss occurs on whatever policy is already in place?
CM: Yes, we catch it. The pre-loss review looks at how coverage maps to that specific building and carrier, what an owner should expect if they have to file, and what they should weigh based on what we know about how that carrier behaves. That’s policy support plus pre-loss documentation tools.
So no, it isn’t purely post-loss maximization. And even on the claim support side, the goal isn’t always to maximize a dollar figure. A lot of it is navigating the process more strategically and streamlining the communication and operations around a claim.
NP: If underpayment on multifamily claims is as systemic as the release implies, why hasn’t a public-adjuster-on-retainer model already become standard practice at this portfolio scale? What’s structurally different about routing it through Tugboat?
CM: Because the public adjuster model was never built for this problem. Most claims are small. Most issues on a portfolio aren’t catastrophic, but that doesn’t make them any less strategic. Is there a liability claim here? Should we file at all, or does filing cost more than it returns? On a large portfolio, you answer that constantly, across many small events, and those decisions compound.
A public adjuster has no economic interest in that work. They’re paid a contingency on recovery, so they show up for large, complex losses and nothing else. The retainer versions that exist are the same model bent to fit something it wasn’t designed for.
What’s different here is that Tugboat isn’t a public adjusting desk with a CRM bolted on. It’s a platform, and it’s AI-driven, which is what makes the volume work. We took the expertise that used to only be available through a public adjuster and put it on every claim, including the ones no PA would touch. An owner’s internal team can now handle losses that would have required a PA before, and they can be strategic from the smallest one up.
Anthony Jaffe (AJ): From where I sit, a public adjuster was someone you called when the loss was big enough and ugly enough that you’d already accepted you’d give up a meaningful piece of the recovery to get it handled. That’s a narrow use case. You’re not calling a PA about a unit fire, or a water line, or a question about whether to file at all.
But those decisions add up across a portfolio. They start at the smallest losses and run all the way to the largest, and until now, nothing covered the bottom of that range. That’s what’s different.
NP: Walk through the wildfire claim. What did the carrier/adjuster consider “resolved,” what did Tugboat find that changed the number, and how long did it take to recover the additional $1M+?
AJ: The carrier treated a lot as settled that wasn’t. The Palisades fire burned nearly everything around us, and the building needed real remediation throughout to clean the units of lead and smoke contamination. The carrier considered that resolved. It wasn’t.
On the repair side, plenty was still open, from something as basic as carpet replacement up through full replacement of the rooftop HVAC units and the ductwork running through the building. None of it was settled in a way that would have let us actually restore the building.
The biggest piece was lost rent. The carrier had closed the books on it and told us to expect the payments to stop. Our property manager didn’t know how to push back; we weren’t certain what our recourse was, and we were looking at hiring an attorney.
Tugboat showed us provisions in our own policy we didn’t know were there, along with a read on how the carrier was likely to move. That let us negotiate to keep loss of rents running as long as it took to restore and reoccupy the building. The additional recovery, over a million dollars, came in across about another six months.
NP: NAA’s most recent data shows multifamily insurance premiums as one of the most volatile line items in operating budgets nationally. Is Tower Lane seeing that kind of acceleration across this portfolio, and is this Tugboat partnership priced into pro formas as an offset?
AJ: Yes, we’re seeing it. Insurance has gone from a line item we barely thought about to one of the biggest drivers, and it’s real across the portfolio.
We do factor Tugboat into the pro forma as a partial offset. Not because it lowers the premium – it doesn’t – but because what we actually recover when we have a loss has gone up enough to matter. That’s the side of the equation we can control.
NP: What did claims handling look like before this, and what specifically was failing that made you sign a portfolio-wide deal rather than handling claims one by one?
AJ: The hardest part wasn’t the claim itself; it was deciding whether to file one at all. I made that call on instinct.
What changed is that we can now evaluate when it’s worth going to the carrier and when it isn’t. And when we do go, the outcomes have been better and the process considerably smoother. Once we saw that on the major claims, handling it one claim at a time stopped making sense.
NP: Is this being rolled out to the full portfolio simultaneously, and does asset-level wildfire/flood exposure factor into how it’s being phased?
AJ: The whole portfolio, at once. We’re not phasing it by wildfire or flood exposure.
We actually started the other way, bringing buildings on one asset at a time. Then we had losses at buildings that weren’t onboarded yet, and it was immediately obvious that was backward. You don’t get to pick which building has the fire. Doing the whole portfolio was also the more economical structure once we ran the math.
– Nick Pipitone
