‘Angry and a little bit panicked’: Florida home insurers drop thousands, but Post guide can help
As another hurricane season ends, it's one more reason for consumers to arm themselves with knowledge about their options in the updated Palm Beach Post Insurance Explorer available today. The online guide offers multiple financial-strength ratings and complaint information analyzed by the newspaper for more than 100 property insurers serving the state.
The stakes for household budgets run high in the nation's most expensive property insurance market, but it's no simple shopping chore as big national companies have largely pulled back and left the field to smaller, state-based insurers.
"I don't know anything about these companies," said homeowner
Two
He said he is paying more than he ever has with the state's last-resort insurer,
The newspaper's guide is "useful because it provided a lot of information on companies I otherwise would not have known anything about," he said.
The guide provides information helpful across the state, not just one region, said
"I use the Explorer all the time and refer my clients there so they don't have to take my word for it when reviewing a company," Chase said this year. "It's a great tool."
In no state is shopping around more important.
The index compares average premiums to household income.
On the west coast,
The most affordable county for home insurance?
Hurricanes including Irma and Michael have generated more than
Citizens officials also cite "the impact of skyrocketing non-weather-related water loss claims in
That means plumbing leaks, roof problems and other claims not directly tied to storms. Citizens and other insurers say the costs of such claims are increasingly inflated by lawsuits and assignment of insurance benefits to contractors, public adjusters and attorneys, who in turn shoot back that insurers are unfairly denying or underpaying claims.
Insurers want state legislators this spring to change rules they say make it too easy to go to court for bigger payouts, but that fight has resulted in a stalemate for more than half a dozen years.
Meanwhile, consumers are left to sort out their options. In tens of thousands of cases, their policies have not been renewed, either because the insurer dropped them or the customer chose to move on, sometimes after rate hikes or claims tussles.
Half of the state's top 10 property insurers served fewer customers at the start of October than they did a year earlier, state records show.
The churn gets more intense in insurance hot spots. In
Statewide,
The No. 2 insurer, Citizens, trimmed down to about 438,000 customers from 452,0000.
Within
That's creating opportunities for other, sometimes smaller companies to move up.
For consumers, the challenge can be taking the measure of insurers who don't necessarily come with familiar brand names, big advertising budgets or their own set of exclusive agents.
Subject to approval by state regulators, Citizens has been considering a raise in the average cost of its standard HO3 homeowner's policy to about
That's why consumers need all the information they can get. More than a few homeowners might be able to sympathize with how Wolfe felt after two insurers dropped him: "Angry and a little bit panicked."
See
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