Insurance companies set to squeeze even more
money out of us this storm season |
Article Courtesy of The Sun Sentinel
By Ron Hurtibise
Published
June 13, 2020
Florida homeowners, already paying nearly the highest
home insurance rates in the nation, should get ready for more sticker
shock if and when their policies next renew.
Premiums for most Florida property owners
are poised to jump again — sharply — as insurers pass along
skyrocketing costs of coverage they need to pay claims after
a catastrophic hurricane or other weather event.
That coverage is called reinsurance. It’s insurance that
insurers must buy to prevent them from going broke — and to
make sure you get paid — after a disaster.
By the June 1 start of every year’s hurricane season,
insurers negotiate new reinsurance contracts for the
upcoming year. Global capital firms provide the coverage,
financed by investors who hope their outlay brings them a
higher percentage of profit than if they had left the money
in stocks, bonds or other investments.
This year, reinsurance prices increased 20% to 30% in
Florida, and averaged 26.1% for companies that cover the
most vulnerable catastrophe zones in the U.S., according to
a report from artemis.bm, a reinsurance-focused news
website.
The increases are the steepest in Florida
in more than a decade and are similar to increases that
drove up rates for policyholders after the 2005 hurricane
season, the report stated, adding that companies hit hardest
by claims and lawsuits in recent years faced increases of
more than 45%.
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Spiraling insurance claims from hurricanes Irma and
Michael are partly to blame, along with ever-increasing lawsuits,
for the coming increase in insurance costs for Florida homeowners,
experts say.
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Big hikes coming for policyholders
Industry experts say the increases soon will trickle down to Florida
property owners who already pay $3,643 on average a year to insure their
homes. That’s nearly $1,338 more than the national average and higher
than any state except Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas.
Recent hurricanes combined with ever-increasing lawsuits against
insurers have steadily eroded the industry’s profitability in Florida,
said Barry Gilway, president and CEO of state-run Citizens Property
Insurance Corp., at a May 20 webinar sponsored by an insurance news
website. As a whole, Florida insurers reported $797 million in profit in
2014 and a $340 million net loss in 2019, Gilway said.
Some policyholders are already seeing higher prices in their renewal
bills because their insurers anticipated the reinsurance price hikes and
factored them into the new rates, said Locke Burt, president and CEO of
Security First Insurance Co.
Other companies will submit rate-hike approval requests in the coming
weeks that reflect reinsurance price increases.
Burt said his company paid 17.5% more for its reinsurance coverage
compared with a year ago and is now requesting approval from state
insurance regulators to increase average policy premiums by 12.8%
beginning in September. To hold down reinsurance costs, Security First
recently sent notices of non-renewal to 5,000 of its coastal customers,
he said.
Three insurers — Capitol Preferred, Edison, and Velocity Risk
Underwriters — were recently approved by the state Office of Insurance
Regulation to raise their average rates between 20% and 40%.
Then in May, state regulators allowed Capitol Preferred to cancel 27,500
of its 108,870 policies with 45 days’ notice after the insurer reported
it would otherwise be unable to afford its reinsurance for the current
hurricane season.
“Agents are scrambling to get them coverage from other companies,” Burt
said.
Other companies with pending or recently approved rate hikes include the
state’s largest insurer, Universal Property & Casualty, with an average
12.4% increase that took effect May 25, plus People’s Trust (10.9%),
Florida Family (6.5%), FedNat (5.5%), and Florida Peninsula (13.5% for
its “preferred” line and 14.7% for its “elite” line).
Some of the poorest-performing companies won’t be able to survive for
long if the reinsurance price hikes aren’t temporary, said Jay Neal,
executive chairman of the Federal Association of Insurance Reform, an
consumer-oriented watchdog group based in Fort Lauderdale.
Neal foresees increased consolidation as strong companies absorb poor
performers, reducing the amount of competition in Florida. Meanwhile,
more and more policyholders will be forced to buy coverage from
state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the so-called insurer of
last resort, as fewer private-market carriers are willing to sell new
policies in parts of southern and central Florida with high claims
rates, he said.
Since March 27, Citizens has been adding about 2,000 policies a week,
usually as a result of cancellation or non-renewal by private market
companies. Citizens has seen its policy count increase from 445,439 to
465,198, which includes about 400 of the canceled Capitol Preferred
policies, according to Christine Ashburn, Citizens’ chief of
communications and legislative affairs. More are expected. “Their
coverage does not expire until June 29, so it is early,” she said.
So many companies are declining to write new business in high-claims
regions, Burt said, that “agents are telling their clients, ‘If you get
a renewal offer, accept it, even with the rate increase. Otherwise, I
have nowhere else to put you.’"
“The problem customers are going to have is not the rate increases. It’s
that no one is going to sell to them at any rate,” Burt said. “In
Orlando, if a house is older than 2010 and worth less than $300,000, no
one is going to write [insurance for] you.”
Why rates are rising
Like all insurance, reinsurance is a roll of the dice. Over the 10 years
between 2007 and 2016 in which Florida escaped any hurricane landfall,
reinsurers made easy money. Rates came down as companies competed for
business.
Then came Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Michael in 2018. Damages
from Irma were estimated at $9.7 billion a few months after the storm.
As of January, the tally had nearly doubled to $17.4 billion, according
to the state Office of Insurance Regulation. Hurricane Michael’s price
tag increased from an estimated $3.4 billion weeks after the storm to
$7.9 billion a year later.
Insurers blame the “loss creep” on rising costs from litigation and
damage blamed on the storms that wasn’t reported until months, if not
years, later.
Loss creep is a big reason that the global capital market is demanding
more money to insure Florida properties, Burt said. “The capital market
is horrified by loss creep of Irma and Michael and said ‘No more,’” he
said.
Burt, a former state senator, doesn’t see an end to insurance cost
increases until the Florida Legislature decides to change laws that
encourage plaintiffs attorneys to bombard insurers with lawsuits. One of
insurers’ most-reviled incentives is called a “fee multiplier” that
encourages attorneys to ask judges to approve inflating the legal fees
they can extract when insurers settle cases rather than proceed to
trial.
Another is the three-year deadline policyholders have to file damage
claims after storms. Insurers believe that long “statute of limitations”
invites abuse.
Neal said the next three years will be tough ones. The current insurance
environment, he said, “is not good for consumers.”
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