State orders Citizens Insurance to provide deeper rate cuts than requested

Ron Hurtibise, South Florida Sun-SentinelSouth Florida Sun Sentinel

For a second straight year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Citizens Property Insurance Corp. has been ordered to roll back its rate requests.

A month after the state-owned company’s Board of Governors voted to ask regulators to approve a 2.6% statewide average rate cut, DeSantis called a news conference to announce that the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation had reduced the cut to -8.7%.

More than 150,000 of about 400,000 customers of the state’s insurer of last resort would see their rates cut by more than 10%, DeSantis said. Citizens’ new rates would take effect on June 1.

Last February, DeSantis announced that insurance regulators had agreed to raise rates by much less than the 14% requested by Citizens’ governors.

During Monday’s news conference at Broward College’s Davie campus, DeSantis said that Citizens’ recent recommended cuts — the first cuts in a decade — were “milquetoast.”

“It was maybe some very modest reductions but really didn’t fully capitalize on the momentum in order to deliver wins for the policyholders,” he said, referring to reduced rates requests filed by private market insurers over the past year and a half.

He credited litigation reforms enacted in 2022 and 2023 with reducing private market insurers’ costs and prompting rate reduction requests by multiple private market companies in recent months.

Of course, rate cuts do not always trigger lower premiums for homeowners, state data shows.

Inflation of the cost to rebuild homes has caused average premium costs to stabilize but so far not to significantly decline. According to newly released cost data, October’s average premium for single family home coverage was $3,751, a $3 uptick from September’s $3,748.

Citizens did not have details about which parts of the state would see the additional reductions announced Monday.

Citizens spokesman Michael Peltier said the company has not yet seen orders that the Office of Insurance Regulation files when it finalizes rate changes.

DeSantis revealed that South Florida would see the deepest cuts because the region had experienced the sharpest increases before the reforms were enacted. The increases resulted from the bulk of what the industry called frivolous litigation originating in South Florida.

The South Florida region overall, including Monroe County, would see rates fall by 13.4%, DeSantis said.

But cuts DeSantis announced for Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties were unchanged from rate-cut recommendations submitted by Citizens in early December for multiperil coverage of owner-occupied single-family homes.

In Broward County, 27,000 policyholders would see average rate cuts of 14.1%, DeSantis said. In Palm Beach County, 26,000 policyholders would see cuts of 11.9%, while 42,000 policyholders in Miami-Dade would see rate cuts averaging 14%.

The only specific county-level cut announced by DeSantis on Monday that differed from Citizens’ previous recommendations were for Monroe County, where 1,000 single-family homeowners coverage are now estimated to see rates decline by 11.3%. Citizens had recommended an 8.5% decrease there.

DeSantis also mentioned rate reductions of 5% to 7% in “the Tampa Bay area.”

Citizens’ recommendations for single-family home policies in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Hernando and Pasco counties ranged from a 0.7% increase for Hillsborough homeowners to a 7.3% increase for Hernando policyholders.

How the revised rates will affect Central Florida was not mentioned. In December, increases were requested for four Central Florida counties: Orange, Osceola, Lake and Brevard.

Neither DeSantis, nor Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworksy, who also spoke at the news conference, provided details about why regulators were able to find deeper cuts than recommended by the company’s staff.

“They basically tweaked it to produce historic rate decreases,” the governor said.

Peltier said he hadn’t seen the office’s justification for the tweaks.

“Back in December, we said we were basing our recommendations on information we had at the time,” he said. “The Florida market was improving and I think that Tim (Cerio, Citizens president and CEO) and other said we welcomed a continued dialogue with the Office of Insurance Regulation to see if we could reduce rates further.”

Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can be reached by phone at 954-356-4071 or by email at [email protected].