The developer's original finishes are one tier. Every owner betterment on top of them is another.

Single-entity coverage is the middle tier of the condo master-policy valuation spectrum: it insures the unit's original finishes and fixtures exactly as the developer installed them at initial construction, which is meaningfully broader than bare-walls but still frozen at the building's original condition. All-in coverage is the top tier. It takes everything single-entity covers and extends it to owner betterments, upgraded flooring, renovated kitchens, custom built-ins, added after the original construction.

The distinction matters most after a renovation. A unit with an upgraded kitchen under a single-entity master policy is only protected up to the developer's original specification; the upgrade itself is the owner's responsibility to insure through HO-6. Under all-in coverage, that upgrade is generally part of what the master policy already insures. Boards should confirm which tier the declaration actually specifies before assuming either applies, and owners who have renovated should confirm their own HO-6 limits account for the gap if the master policy is single-entity.

Sizing the gap single-entity leaves the owner

The practical question is not which tier sounds broader, it is how many dollars of exposure the owner carries when the master policy is single-entity and the unit has been improved. Picture a unit that closed with the developer's builder-grade kitchen and, five years later, has quartz counters, custom cabinetry, and engineered hardwood the owner paid for out of pocket. After a covered kitchen fire, a single-entity master policy rebuilds to the original specification, the builder-grade cabinets and the original flooring, and stops there. The delta between the original spec and what the owner actually installed, often several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars per renovated room, is the owner's own responsibility. That is the improvements and betterments exposure an HO-6 walls-in policy is meant to insure. An all-in master policy, by contrast, extends the association's coverage to those post-construction betterments, so the same fire is rebuilt to the improved condition without the owner reaching for their HO-6 betterments limit.

There is a second, less obvious piece of the gap that survives even under all-in: the master-policy deductible. Whichever valuation tier the association buys, a covered loss still runs through the master deductible before the policy pays, and the governing documents usually let the board pass that deductible back to unit owners as a special assessment. The standard ISO loss assessment endorsement (HO 04 35) caps the portion of any assessment attributable to the master deductible at a separate $1,000 sublimit, no matter how large the owner's overall loss assessment limit is. So an owner can move from single-entity to all-in, close the betterments gap entirely, and still be exposed to a five-figure deductible pass-through unless they have separately asked their carrier to raise that $1,000 deductible-assessment sublimit. All-in narrows the valuation gap; it does not touch the deductible gap.

When the tier on paper no longer matches the units

The most common failure is not choosing the wrong tier, it is a valuation basis that was correct once and quietly stopped matching reality. A declaration written at construction may specify single-entity, the board may never revisit it, and twenty years of owner renovations accumulate on top of coverage frozen at the original build. Nothing in the master policy flags this drift, and it surfaces only after a loss, when an owner learns their renovated interior was never the association's to insure. The mirror problem happens when a declaration is amended to a different basis and owner HO-6 policies are never re-sized to match, so owners keep paying for walls-in coverage the master policy now provides, or drop coverage the master policy never picked up. Neither the association nor the owner is wrong in isolation; the two documents simply stopped pointing at the same coverage line.

Confirming the tier is a document exercise, not a judgment call. Read the actual valuation language in the recorded declaration and the master policy declarations page, since the dedicated community-association markets will write to whichever basis the declaration requires and price single-entity and all-in above bare-walls to reflect the interior exposure they are picking up. Do not infer the tier from the premium or from a broker's summary. Once the basis is confirmed, the board's job is to make it legible to owners: state the valuation tier in plain terms, publish the master deductible in dollars so owners can size their HO-6 betterments and loss assessment limits against it, and remind owners that a single-entity basis leaves every post-closing upgrade on their side of the line. That one page of communication resolves most of the after-a-loss disputes the two tiers otherwise generate.