Nicolas Lares, Founder of Insur3Tech On Why Insurance Isn’t Just an Expense, It’s a Strategic Asset

“Renters insurance has the highest profit margin of any insurance product that exists in the entire ecosystem,” he tells me.

Think about that. Every month, residents pay their renters insurance premium. Maybe $15, maybe $25. They rarely file claims. And at the end of the year, the insurance company keeps the profit and distributes it to shareholders.

But what if that profit could flow back to property owners instead?

That’s the thesis behind Insur3Tech, the company Nicolas founded after learning about innovative insurance structures in the logistics industry. And it’s not theoretical, three major property management companies are already running captives, turning what used to be a pure expense into a strategic profit center.

This is the story of how insurance became one of the most interesting opportunities in property management. And why most operators are leaving money on the table because they don’t understand how the game actually works.

From Baseball to Insurance (Via Amazon Logistics)

Nicolas didn’t set out to revolutionize insurance in property management. Like most people in this industry, he fell into it.

“There’s a running joke in the insurance world,” he tells me, “which I’ve come to find out there’s also one in the property management space as well, where no one typically goes into it intentionally. You kind of fell in by accident.”

Nicolas grew up as an athlete, played baseball collegiately, and had to make the classic choice: chase the major leagues or do something else with his life.

“Do I want to spend seven, eight years in minor league buses traveling the US with a bunch of guys eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and dinner?” he remembers thinking. “I decided it wasn’t the right path for me.”

He pivoted his senior year, jumped into tech, and got hired by a large IT cybersecurity firm in Miami called Kaseya. Then COVID hit. He was the last one hired, which meant he was the first one let go.

“I was sitting around looking for a job,” Nicolas recalls. “I found myself dating a girl that I couldn’t afford to take out to dinners on the weekends. So I’m like, let me try to get into something, whatever I can find, I’m just gonna jump into it.”

His best friend was working on insuring Amazon’s logistics network right as COVID sent e-commerce demand through the roof. They needed help scaling. Nicolas jumped in, got licensed, and fell in love with insurance.

“It’s something that everybody really needs, it touches every industry, so people get it,” he explains. “There’s a real value: it helps people sleep better at night knowing they’re covered in the event something bad happens.”

But then the market turned. Traditional carriers started pulling out of California and Florida property insurance today. Thousands of delivery companies needed to find insurance within three months or go out of business.

That’s when Nicolas learned about captives.

The Syndicated Insurance Model Nobody Talks About

Here’s how traditional insurance works: you pay premiums, the carrier/ underwriter invests the premiums, risk is reinsured, the carrier pays any claims, and if there’s profit left over at the end of the year, the carrier keeps it and distributes it to shareholders.

Here’s how a self-owned or syndicated insurance group works: you bundle a group of similar operators together, pool their risk, risk is reinsured, the pool pays any claims, and if there’s profit at the end of the year, it flows back to the group members. 

“People who are not in insurance typically don’t realize that there is an alternative to just paying a traditional insurance company,” Nicolas explains. “There’s a vehicle where people can actually get that money back. And for people looking for more NOI, this is something that’s really attractive to a lot of people that they don’t understand really exists.”

When Nicolas discovered this model, it clicked immediately. “I was like, man, this is the best way to do insurance. Why isn’t this the way things are essentially done from the beginning?”

The question became: what industry could benefit most from this structure?

His research led him to renters insurance. Highest profit margin. Massive volume. And property management companies were just letting carriers keep all that profit.

“If somebody is paying for insurance, odds are an insurance company is making money off of that,” Nicolas points out. “They have the best data scientists, actuaries, and risk management professionals. They know better than you and I if a product is or isn’t going to be profitable.”

So why not capture that profit for property owners instead?

The Resident Benefits Package Reframe

Nicolas and I get into a solid discussion about resident benefits packages, those bundled offerings that include things like renters insurance, HVAC filters, credit reporting, etc.

The challenge? Residents often see them as junk fees. Another $30-40 tacked onto their rent with unclear value.

“The disconnect that I’m seeing,” Nicolas observes, “is people are saying they don’t see value in what’s being provided. So you just have to think about: are you communicating the value? Are you actually delivering on the value?”

I share my perspective: “I’ve bought car insurance, home insurance, renters insurance my whole life. I’ve never once looked at it as a value-add. I look at it like ‘they’re asking me to do it.’ It’s not value-added, it’s compliance.”

Nicolas pushes back thoughtfully. He references Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; safety is foundational. “At the end of the day, if I as an individual am looking to rent a place and I have two options, one is gonna offer me insurance and cover me and one’s not gonna offer it to me, or I have to go figure it out on my own… I’m picking the one that’s offering it to me.”

But here’s where it gets interesting. The real value isn’t just peace of mind for residents. It’s the underwriting profit flowing back to owners through the captive structure.

“What if you could show your residents: ‘Hey, this year your building or your portfolio performed really well. We had minimal claims. And because of that, we’re actually giving you a credit toward your next year’s premium’?” Nicolas suggests. “Now you’re incentivizing good behavior. You’re creating a shared benefit structure.”

That’s when resident benefits packages stop being junk fees and start being legitimate value propositions.

The Compounding Advantage of Early Adoption

One of Nicolas’s most interesting points is about timing. Not just when to adopt pooled insurance, but why early adoption creates compounding advantages.

“I had somebody tell me this once,” he shares. “Small percentage differences at the beginning make a huge difference at the end. If you look at the stock market, right, if you get into something when it’s one hundred dollars versus waiting two years for it to go to one hundred and two dollars, the amount that it’s gonna need to appreciate to make that dollar difference for the early adopter is massively different.”

The pooled insurance structure isn’t just about capturing profit today. It’s about compounding that profit over decades.

“I don’t know about you,” I tell Nicolas, “but I’ve not met a single company that is like, ‘we intend to be here for like three to five years and then we’re out.’ Everybody we talk to is like, ‘we intend to have a transgenerational wealth compounding, be here forever’ business, with the exception of people who are kind of going through an exit or some kind of monetization event.”

If you’re building for the long term, the math is clear. Starting a captive today, even if the immediate gains are modest, creates exponential value over 10, 20, 30 years.

“The people who are getting into these captive structures today,” Nicolas points out, “they’re essentially the early adopters. And what’s gonna happen is ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road, they’re gonna have this massive cash stockpile that’s been built within the captive from all these years of underwriting profit.”

That’s not just profit. That’s strategic capital you can deploy however you want.

The Tax Strategy Nobody’s Talking About

I mention something that’s been fascinating to me: “At least three different companies I know are running captives right now, and those captives are super interesting when you consider how that can evolve in terms of even a tax strategy and tax planning.”

Nicolas lights up. “A hundred percent. If people start to realize that, hey, you could essentially defer paying some of your taxable income if you set up a captive insurance structure correctly… that’s a whole other benefit that people don’t even realize exists.”

This is where insurance stops being just about risk management and becomes balance sheet optimization. It becomes a tool for:

• Capturing underwriting profit that normally goes to carriers

• Building strategic capital reserves

• Tax optimization and deferral

• Creating incentive structures for resident behavior

“Insurance isn’t just buying a policy anymore,” I summarize. “There’s a whole lot more to it as it relates to your balance sheet and profit creation.”

The Athlete’s Mindset in Business

When I ask Nicolas what advice he’d give his younger self, his answer reveals something deeper about how he approaches business.

“Listen to myself,” he says. “I think we all have those gut feelings, conscious, whatever you want to call it, your conviction. I made a lot of fork-in-the-road decisions where I put other people’s expectations or an idea of what I thought I should do and didn’t listen internally.”

He pauses. “Sometimes I question what if I would have walked away from playing baseball just a couple of years before, where would I be now? What if I did things that led me in my curiosity to chase those things that were pulling me in that direction instead of what I thought I should do because that’s the beaten path?”

But then he reframes: “I really wouldn’t want to change anything, man, because it’s been a beautiful journey. Life is a lot like driving a car. You can only look in the rearview mirror to see where you’ve been, look ahead to know where you’re going.”

I connect with this immediately. “It’s funny how people we’ve had on the show who are former athletes and high-level athletes, the commitment, the conviction, the grit, all that stuff translates very frequently into business.”

Nicolas nods. “It boils down to: are you able to make adjustments when you get new information? That plays at the heart of entrepreneurship, that plays at the heart of being an athlete, and really just life in general. If something happens that doesn’t go according to plan, how do you respond? How do you adjust?”

The feedback loop in baseball is immediate. Every pitch is an adjustment. That trains a different way of thinking about iteration and improvement.

“Being an athlete where each pitch is an adjustment that you have to make, where the feedback cycle is rapid,” Nicolas explains, “it really helps you build that framework and mental model of how you apply that to other parts of your life. And that’s all it is, just making adjustments.”

I reference Greg Maddux, the legendary Braves/Cubs pitcher. “His ability to recall and replay and tune a pitch count to the outcome he’s looking for two, three, four, five months from now is pretty remarkable. The strategy and thinking around that is not lost on me.”

That’s what Nicolas is doing with Insur3Tech. Playing the long game. Making small adjustments today that compound into massive advantages years from now.

From My Side of the Mic

What gets me about Nicolas’s story is the clarity of the opportunity he’s identified.

Insurance in property management has always been treated as a necessary expense. Something you budget for, minimize if possible, and certainly don’t think of as a profit center.

But that’s only true if you’re playing the traditional game. If you’re just buying policies from carriers and letting them keep the underwriting profit.

The captive insurance model flips that entirely. Suddenly, insurance isn’t just about risk transfer. It’s about:

Strategic capital accumulation

Tax optimization

Resident incentive alignment

Long-term wealth compounding

What I keep coming back to is Nicolas’s point about early adoption and compounding. The companies that start captives/pools today aren’t just capturing this year’s underwriting profit. They’re building cash reserves that will compound for decades.

“Small percentage differences at the beginning make a huge difference at the end.”

That’s not just an insurance strategy. That’s an investment strategy. That’s why I know of at least three major property management companies that are already doing this. They’ve done the math. They’ve seen what 10, 20, 30 years of underwriting profit looks like when it flows back to owners instead of carriers.

And they’ve realized: this changes everything.

The resident benefits package conversation is also worth unpacking. I’ll admit I approached it skeptically. I’ve never looked at insurance as value-add. It always felt like compliance.

But Nicolas reframed it in a way that actually makes sense: what if residents could share in the upside? What if good behavior, low claims, property care actually resulted in tangible benefits like premium credits or profit sharing?

That changes the dynamic entirely. It stops being a fee you’re forced to pay and starts being a partnership with aligned incentives.

The companies that figure this out first are the ones that can articulate this value proposition clearly to residents; they’re going to have a massive retention and satisfaction advantage.

What I also appreciate about Nicolas is the athlete’s mindset he brings to this. The constant adjustment. The rapid feedback loops. The long-term strategic thinking.

He’s not just selling insurance. He’s rebuilding the entire framework for how property management companies think about risk, profit, and strategic capital.

And he’s doing it with the patience and conviction of someone who understands that the real payoff comes years from now, not quarters from now.

That’s the difference between tactics and strategy. Tactics optimize for this year. Strategy optimizes for the next twenty years.

Captive insurance is strategy.

Don’t Miss This Conversation

If you’re treating insurance as just another expense line item… if you’re letting carriers keep all the underwriting profit from your resident benefits packages… if you’ve never heard of captive/pooled insurance structures and what they could mean for your balance sheet…

This conversation with Nicolas Lares is required viewing.

Watch the full episode to hear Nicolas break down exactly how captive insurance works, why renters insurance has the highest profit margin in the industry, and how early adoption creates compounding advantages over decades.

You’ll learn why at least three major property management companies are already running captives, how this becomes a tax strategy and not just risk management, and why small percentage differences today create massive outcomes years from now.

The episode is live now.

Because here’s the truth: insurance isn’t just about risk anymore. It’s about profit. It’s about strategic capital. It’s about building wealth that compounds over generations.

The operators who figure this out first? They’re going to have a structural advantage that’s almost impossible to catch.

Which side of that equation do you want to be on?