Property insurance experts cautiously optimistic ahead of storm season

tallahassee A “below-normal” year for storms could further a positive trend for Florida’s insurance market, industry experts contend.

But because of Florida’s location between the Atlantic and Gulf, homeowners will always be at risk, which will temper any potential reductions to premiums.

Heading into the Atlantic storm season that begins June 1, insurance experts said legislative reforms in 2022 and 2023 targeting “frivolous” lawsuits, along with a year without any storm hits, have allowed some “softening” in homeowners insurance prices, growth in new carriers into the state, and a fall in the policy count by state-backed Citizens Property Insurance from 1.41 million policies in October 2023 to 336,000.

“We are just becoming more and more resilient in the state. So, I’m kind of optimistic that, as we see the next storm, we are going to be in better shape than we have been in the past,” said Patricia Born, who is the Midyette Eminent Scholar in Risk Management and Insurance at Florida State University’s Herbert Wertheim College of Business.

The industry is further helped right now from a “soft cycle” for reinsurance, the insurance for insurers.

But don’t anticipate any decline to erase the sharp rise in premiums Florida residents endured in the last 10 years, according to the nonprofit Coalition for an Insurable Future.

And as with every hurricane season, it only takes one storm to upend years of work that industry officials say helped attract 20 new property and casualty insurance companies with more than $850 million in new capital into the state’s market.

On May 20, Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky and Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia announced the three latest property and casualty insurers entering Florida’s market: Texas-based Builder Reciprocal Insurance Exchange, Lake Mary-based Frontline Insurance Reciprocal Exchange and Arizona-based Wingsail Insurance Company.

“Competition is the best way to ensure that Floridians can access the best coverage at the best price,” Ingoglia said in a released statement.

Born said while the industry looks strong, the Florida market needs more nationwide providers.

“We would prefer that more insurers that have a footprint across the whole country would be writing in Florida, so that they’re diversified more broadly,” Born said.

Chris Dittman, executive managing director for Dothan, Aabae Aon Corporation, said the reforms in Florida have resulted in sustained profitability.

“Florida is a very risky state, and it is the peak risk in the world, and so there is underwriting income needed in these (non-catastrophe) years to pay for the (castrophe) losses, because those will happen,” Dittman said during a media call hosted by the AM Best insurance ratings firm.

Lawmakers in 2022 and 2023 eliminated one-way attorney fees and banned assignment of benefits, where contractors would take over policyholder claims. The efforts also imposed larger rate increases for customers of the Citizens Property Insurance Corp., to bring rates closer to private carriers and reduce the number of policies held by the state-backed insurer.

An AM Best report out last week said Floridas market had stabilized and called it an “increasingly manageable market.”

The report stated Floridadomiciled personal property specialist companies recorded nearly $1 billion in underwriting gains, a vast improvement from the $132 million underwriting loss two years earlier.

“The improved Florida property insurance landscape reflects reduced litigation and claim solicitation, attracting new writers to the state while allowing existing writers to recover from losses in earlier years and take advantage of more refined pricing sophistication,” said Lauren Magro, AM Best senior financial analyst.

“While 2024 marked the first year of an underwriting profit for the segment in over a decade, results in 2025 only further extended this trend and benefited from no named hurricanes making landfall”