Brian Kong

Brian is the founding partner of Palm Trinity Insurance Services and runs the firm's commercial habitational and restaurant placements alongside founding partner Ron Ng. The firm operates as a California stock corporation headquartered at 4091 Riverside Drive, Suite 218, Chino, California 91710 — placing more than $5 million in annualized commercial premium across over 4,900 active customers, 97% domiciled in California.

Brian's day-to-day work centers on submission preparation, carrier negotiation, and renewal strategy for the firm's larger and more complex placements — particularly the older California apartment buildings, restaurant operators with substantial liquor revenue, and the hotel-and-motel hospitality book. He owns the relationships with most of the firm's wholesale-broker channels for E&S placements and with the admitted carriers active in California habitational.

Brian has been writing California commercial insurance for 13 years. Before founding Palm Trinity, he worked across multiple California brokerages on commercial accounts. The firm's specialization in commercial habitational (apartment buildings of 5+ units) and restaurants reflects 10+ years of carrier-relationship building in those two specific verticals — the carrier appetites in California for both have shifted hard since 2017, and the working knowledge of which markets are open for which risk profile is one of the firm's main competitive advantages.

Brian's market read sits at the level of carrier appetite, not just policy form. When admitted carriers exit California habitational (as State Farm did in 2024 with 42,000 multifamily policies, and as Hartford and Travelers have done at varying degrees of selectivity), the substitution path — to E&S, to surplus lines wholesalers, to the FAIR Plan + Difference in Conditions stack — has to be reconstructed for each affected account at renewal. Brian has been working that substitution path continuously since 2017.

Commercial apartment building insurance: admitted, E&S, and FAIR Plan + DIC stack placements for 5-100 unit buildings across all six Southern California counties. Particular fluency in the rent-control overlay (statewide AB 1482, plus the city-specific RSOs across LA County), the seismic-retrofit conversation for unreinforced-masonry buildings, and the ordinance-or-law coverage that drives California rebuild costs.

Restaurant insurance: full-service, quick-service, Japanese-vertical (sushi, hot-pot, sukiyaki, shabu-shabu), and high-liquor operators. Carrier programs Brian works with include Sampo and other Japanese-vertical specialists in addition to the standard hospitality-carrier appetite. Liquor liability, dram-shop history, and operating-hours underwriting all sit in his domain.

Hotel and motel insurance: full-service resort, mid-scale business, limited-service motel, and the Coachella Valley resort tier with its festival-weekend underwriting. California innkeeper-liability statutes (Civil Code §§1859, 1860) and the practical handling of guest-property limits at luxury-tier properties.

Brian is reachable through the Palm Trinity main office at (213) 616-8500 or at briank@palmtrinity.com. For new business submissions, the fastest path is the firm's general info@palmtrinity.com address with declarations page, three to five years of currently-valued loss runs, and a brief operations narrative attached — Brian or one of the producers will respond within one business day.