Florida’s Home Insurance Industry May Be Worse Than Anyone RealizesUS 30-Year Mortgage Rate Rises to Five-Month High of 7.
That’s a signal, the researchers said, that Florida’s insurance market may be full of weak players and is even more precarious than already known. Petrelli said litigation is escalating in a way his company couldn’t have anticipated. He cited evidence of law firms backed by deep-pocketed investors that use search engine optimization to find homeowners who want repairs done, and then encourage them to bring suit. “They were targeting insurers,” he said.
The state’s struggle to hold onto private insurers is what brought Demotech to Florida in the first place. In the wake of 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, many Floridians were denied coverage by the private market. So they turned to the insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance Corp. The state, for its part, tried to get people back onto private insurance. But many larger companies were shrinking their exposure to the riskiest markets.
In a very short time, however, Demotech went from having no business in Florida to rating at its peak well over half of property insurers there. The company rated 95% of the insurers who accepted policies being transferred from the state-back insurer, Citizens, according to the Harvard paper, allowing Florida to depopulate its state program. In 2012, 200,000 state policies were transferred to Demotech-approved insurers, the Harvard paper added.
“Three insurers announced recently that they’re actually going to be filing with us to reduce their property insurance rates,” said Yaworsky. “This study cites data from over a decade ago. It seems to me that the market and the industry has moved on.” Petrelli said this is conjecture. He noted the authors themselves admit their “counterfactual” model only explains close to 60% of the variation between Demotech’s and AM Best’s ratings. He said his own analysis of public filings shows that Demotech companies rated A or higher have similar rates of trouble over a 10-year period as AM Best companies rated B+ or higher.