Willis has put a number on what brokers have been feeling at renewal all year. In the fall 2026 edition of its Insurance Marketplace Realities report, released October 1, the broker reports that large and complex commercial property rates fell an average of 14.5 percent in the second quarter of 2026 — nearly double the 8.4 percent decline of a year earlier. Shared and layered programs, the placements split across five or more carriers, did even better: down 23.41 percent. Property pricing, Willis says, is trending toward where it stood in 2019, before the 2018–2024 hard market did its work. Casualty, in the same report, is a different country. If you are renewing this cycle, you are really renewing two markets at once.
What changed in property?
Capacity came back, and then it started competing. Willis describes a property market awash in capacity through the first half of 2026: softening reinsurance rates lowered carriers’ own costs, recent catastrophe losses have been comparatively benign — global insured catastrophe losses in the first half of 2026 were the lowest since 2020, after 2025 posted $107 billion, the sixth straight year above $100 billion — and insurers are writing from a position of underwriting profit, with Canadian carriers reporting half-year combined ratios mostly between 89 and 94 percent. Profitable carriers with reinsurance relief and growth targets do not sit on their hands. They bid. Domestic and international insurers are both chasing growth, including, notably, on natural-catastrophe-exposed risks that were hard to place two years ago.
How much room do property buyers actually have?
More than the headline average suggests, if the program is structured to be bid on. Willis’s Canadian outlook describes reductions reaching the 30 to 40 percent range depending on insured values, loss experience, submission quality, and program structure. Buyers are also restructuring rather than simply re-pricing: simplifying excess layers, consolidating capacity into quota share arrangements, and taking the enhanced terms carriers are offering to win participations — higher sublimits, engineering fee allowances, and multiyear agreements with pre-negotiated rate reductions at future renewals. In other words, the leverage is not just a lower rate. It is a better-built program, locked in for more than one year, priced by carriers who currently need the business more than the business needs any one of them.
Why isn’t casualty getting the same relief?
Because casualty’s problem is not capacity. It is severity. Auto liability and umbrella and excess liability for high-hazard risks remain under pressure from outsized verdicts and the broader litigation environment — the forces the industry groups under social inflation. A property underwriter can re-price a roof; a casualty underwriter is pricing what a jury might do in 2031, and that math has not softened. Willis does flag early indications that rate increases in excess casualty may be nearing their peak, helped by new capacity arriving through broker-led facilities and newly formed managing general agents. But nearing a peak is not a decline, and underwriting discipline in casualty is, if anything, tightening: carriers are getting more selective about risk quality, controls, and loss history even where pricing stays competitive. The split, in short, is structural. Property got cheaper because its costs fell. Casualty stays expensive because its costs haven’t.
What should a buyer do with a split market?
Three things follow from the report’s own logic. First, run property like an auction, not a renewal: start early, make carriers compete for layers, and be willing to restructure the program — that is where the outsized reductions are being found. Second, spend the savings deliberately. Willis makes the point most sharply about cyber, where rates are holding roughly flat in a band from five percent down to five percent up: the report urges buyers to reinvest savings into higher limits, because AI-enabled ransomware and data-exfiltration threats are still rising even when the price of the policy is not. A soft property market is a one-time budget event; buying back limits and sublimits you surrendered during the hard market is the durable use of it. Third, do not budget casualty relief that is not there. Plan for pressure on auto liability and high-hazard umbrella, invest in the submission — loss history, controls, documented risk management — because in a disciplined market, submission quality is the pricing lever you actually control.
What could end the property softening?
Two things, mainly. The first is weather: one severe catastrophe year rewrites reinsurance pricing and carrier appetite quickly, and 2025’s $107 billion in insured losses is a reminder that the benign first half of 2026 is a streak, not a law. The second is consolidation. Willis flags a run of deals — Definity acquiring Travelers Canada, Wawanesa’s acquisition of Everest Canada, completed October 1, 2026, Zurich acquiring Beazley, Sompo acquiring Aspen — and notes honestly that nobody yet knows what fewer, larger carriers will do to capacity and competitive pressure over time. Buyers who lock multiyear terms now are, in part, hedging exactly that uncertainty.
The bottom line
Rates and risk are no longer moving together across lines, and the gap between them is the story of this renewal cycle. Property buyers have genuine room to negotiate — on price, on structure, and on term length — for the first time in most of a decade. Casualty buyers are still paying for verdict severity that shows no sign of retreating. The operators who come out ahead will be the ones who treat those as two separate negotiations, because that is what the market has already decided they are. The full report, covering rate predictions across more than thirty lines, is available from Willis/WTW; the findings summarized here were reported by Insurance-Canada.ca from the report’s release.