Insurer Offers Environmental Protection : Liability: The coverage is likened to title insurance. The policies are designed to speed up commercial real estate transactions.

In a service billed as one-stop shopping, a newly formed Long Beach company Monday began offering environmental-liability insurance coverage designed to speed commercial real estate transactions.

First Environmental Review Insurance Co. will provide both an environmental inspection of a property and as much as $2 million in insurance for two years after researching the site. The company intends to write policies in most cases within four weeks of application.

“The intention is to be very analogous to title insurance,” said Craig DeRoy, First Environmental executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Virtually as common in commercial real estate as termite inspections in residential sales, environmental assessments are used to warn would-be owners and their lending banks of unseen hazardous waste dumps and other pollution for which they could be held responsible after buying a property.

First Environmental, apparently for the first time, will offer liability insurance along with a so-called Phase 1 inspection--in one package. A Phase 1 inspection, which includes aerial photographs but not soil tests, is designed to reveal the history of the site and its previous uses. If done with legal “due diligence,” a standard that has yet to be fully described, such inspections might offer protection from liability for often-expensive cleanups required under the federal Superfund law and other statutes.

But these assessments can interfere with the timing of a real estate deal, to the frustration of sellers, developers and lenders. And in recent years, the insurance industry has moved to exclude coverage of many pollution claims from general liability policies.

“You could view this new offering as a direct response to a decrease of traditional insurance coverage available,” said Jeffrey D. Masters, an environmental insurance specialist and partner at Cox, Castle & Nicholson, which represents property owners, developers and lenders.