I hope she’s wrong about Americans not wanting to own homes.
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Landlords aren’t seeing and passing on insurance increases to their tenants?
Good point, but I still hope she’s wrong. But Florida, California, and others, are already seeing huge price increases, and then we’re starting to see some insurance companies leaving certain areas all together.
But yea, I’m sure that landlords will pass along the price increases, at least what they can.
I live in Iowa where multiple companies are dropping or no longer writing new policies. Our policy went up over 40% this year. As much as I hate to see it, it makes sense that it’s happening.
In October, we had our third roof installed since 2011. Twice for hail & once for wind damage.
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Part of the problem, a big part, about insurance in Florida is all the “free roofs” that were handed out in the past 3 years.
It went about like this:
Apex or another scummy roofing company shows up and says “your roof is damaged, we can replace it for insurance and a small fee”.
They have you assign them the rights.
Their legal branch gets involved, submits a notice to the insurance company that the home needs a roof.
They submit a bill to the insurance company for 30-40k.
Typically, they’d have 10-12k for the law firm, 18-24k for the roof, with costs being about 6-10k depending on the home.
The insurance company can’t defend a case in court for that amount, so they settle.
Rinse, repeat.
Insurance companies don’t lose money. They spread the costs out, so Suze Orman pays 28k for a condo insurance. It has absolutely dickall to do with climate change.
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Fortunately, I live in a region that doesn’t experience severe weather such as Tornados, hurricanes, hail storms, extreme high winds, wildfires etc… I can’t imagine what some of you are having to pay for HO insurance.
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Yes Sir!
They used to canvas neighborhoods & knock on doors. They knocked on mine.
It seemed if the damage was not roof-condemable, they’d make a claim for you anyways.
State of Florida stepped in & now forbid door to door solicitations.
I guess they don’t have stadiums named after them now.
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All true, I’ve seen the invoices for $40K re-roofs on a 1800 SF ranch style homes.
Total FUBAR mess they made, promising “free roofs” because a squirrel sneezed on it.
Now we’re all paying for them…
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Playing devils advocate a little here… how much of this is people insisting on living where god clearly doesn’t want them to? Like how many times is New Orleans gonna be rebuilt? I think I saw that insurance is pulling out of there… or wildfires in California I think I also saw…
If a city floods every few years I don’t feel that government or insurance should be on the hook when it floods… and for the wildfires, if they would let a major burn (controlled or not) go through and take care of all the underbrush, it wouldn’t be as big a problem, but since we keep putting out small fires before they can we’ve (people) allowed all the “tinder” to build up and then we are surprised when we get a fire we can’t put out… to paraphrase from one of my wife’s favorite movies, we made the weather and then stand in the rain and say shit it’s raining.
I’m personally not a huge believer in climate change, not in the way they wanna say it… and I don’t think they are either, because if they were Obama (or really anyone in say Martha’s Vineyard) would take up my offer to trade my little farm in the Midwest for his ocean front mansion since it’s gonna be underwater in a couple of years, but he just keeps ignoring my offer to take it off his hands.
Weather shifts, has for all of human existence. If an insurance company wants to not cover (or charge a lot more) an area because the risk is too high, that’s free market. It will correct itself, whether that is people moving to areas that aren’t so expensive, or new companies stepping in to fill the need.
Sucks for us at the moment, but this too shall pass.
California is seeing an insurance exodus. People with 10 20 30 40 year policies are getting dropped left and right. The effects of a multi-year structural drought on trees and brush, combined with a particularly inept major electric utility running run fire through kindling …
On the good, pine firewood is way cheap. People can hardly give it away… too many dead trees to remove.
Welcome to the Anthropocene
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And that is the problem I have with it. They can’t charge what those properties should be charged. If you want to build on a sandbar in the gulf of Mexico, I’m fine with it. Your insurance cost should reflect the fact that the home will need rebuilt every 2-5 years.
Instead, they get a small up charge(relative to the risk), and people like me who live in the highest elevation in Florida with the lowest winds, subsidize that home’s insurance cost.
The whole free roof thing here is infuriating. I just paid to re-roof my rental property, a courtyard villa. It’s a 1250sq home, hip roof in Lady Lake FL. Cost was $380 a square(a good deal by the way). Total was $9232.
As an aside, I could get the same home re-roofed in NJ for probably 2/3 that price.
Apex would have and has re-roofed houses in the same neighborhood(same exact size) for just around 30k, charged to insurance. The insurance on my property went from $850 annual to just around $2400 in the space of 4 years.
Free roof for you, higher premiums for me.
If you want to live on the coast, fair enough. Your costs should reflect it.
As far as hurricanes go, intensity and frequency has come down. Costs have gone up simply because people like living near the coast.
As I said, dick all to do with climate change.
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I agree with you completely that the people living in the high risk area should bear the cost of the risk represented by that choice.
I have no interest in people who make smart decisions (whether we are talking about living area, health, driving, ect) being forced to carry the weight for people who make poor choices.
Regarding APEX, the insurance companies really should look into legal proceedings, because this seems like insurance fraud to me, especially with the example you have given. But maybe thats why they are pulling out (or jacking the price)… cheaper to pay it out than litigate it, but they are in the business of making money, so that cost will get passed on.
Lived in Florida for over 50 years. Never had a hurricane claim. This year my premium went to 5600.00. Decided to drop the hurricane coverage. New premium for insurance is 560.00. Not going to help pay for all of the people that live in high risk areas or build high risk homes.
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We sold our home a few years ago. We had just done an overlay on the roof (I’m a tightwad) just a few months before the sale. Had a hail storm shortly afterwards.
Anyway we sold the house. The buyers hired a HI and produced a short list of repair requests items. Most of which were items that I had intentionally left for the inspector to find. You know if they find a few things they tend to not look real hard. LOL!
Anyway life goes on and about a year and a half after the sale the buyer contacts me an says that a “roofing company” came buy and said the the roof had hail damage and wanted me to claim it on my insurance as it had to have happened before they bought it.
I politely declined and told him my opinion of door knocking roofing companies. I further told he he should get a second (or in this case a third opinion, he had the home inspected after all) and talk to his neighbor across the back fence who happened to be a roofer.
After we get any kind of a storm, wind or hail, their running around here like Kirby salesmen hawking “new roofs for everyone!”
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Insurance companies are doing just fine overall. The problem is that none of them are large enough to take the hits that some states bring. In this industry, maybe bigger is better.
Over the past five years, revenue has been growing at a CAGR of 3.8% to $147.8 billion, including an expected 0.3% decline in 2023. Profit is also expected to climb to 12.1% of revenue in 2023 from 11.9% in 2018.
Market share concentration for the Homeowners’ Insurance industry in the US is low, which means the top four companies generate less than 40% of industry revenue.
For the consumer:
Operators managed to increase premiums sufficiently to cover claims costs, keeping the industry profitable. In addition, an increase in fixed-income investments accelerated revenue gains for operators and stricter underwriting criteria and higher capital reserves supported profitability.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A jury on Thursday awarded $1 million to climate scientist Michael Mann who sued a pair of conservative writers 12 years ago after they compared his depictions of global warming to a convicted child molester.
Mann, a professor of climate science at the University of Pennsylvania, rose to fame for a graph first published in 1998 in the journal Nature that was dubbed the “hockey stick” for its dramatic illustration of a warming planet.
The work brought Mann wide exposure but also many skeptics, including the two writers Mann took to court for comments that he said affected his career and reputation in the U.S. and internationally.
“It feels great,” Mann said Thursday after the six-person jury delivered its verdict. ”It’s a good day for us, it’s a good day for science.”
In 2012, a libertarian think tank named the Competitive Enterprise Institute published a blog post by Rand Simberg, then a fellow at the organization, that compared investigations into Mann’s work to the case of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State University who was convicted of sexually assaulting multiple children. At the time, Mann also worked at Penn State.
Mann’s research was investigated after his and other scientists’ emails were leaked in 2009 in an incident that brought further scrutiny of the “hockey stick” graph, with skeptics claiming Mann manipulated data. Investigations by Penn State and others found no misuse of data by Mann, but his work continued to draw attacks, particularly from conservatives.
“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data,” Simberg wrote. Another writer, Mark Steyn, later referenced Simberg’s article in his own piece in National Review, calling Mann’s research “fraudulent.”
The jury in Superior Court of the District of Columbia found that Simberg and Steyn made false statements, awarding Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each writer. It awarded punitive damages of $1,000 from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn, after finding that the pair made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”
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