Florida Homeowners Still Waiting for Lower Home Insurance Rates

According to Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, homeowners will have to continue waiting for lower Florida homeowner insurance rates. As premiums continue to soar due to insurers pulling out of the Florida market, local legislators say it will be years before premiums start to decline. 

In an interview with House Speaker Paul Renner that aired Sunday on WJXT’s “This Week in Jacksonville,” Renner said, “It took years to get in the ditch and it will take a couple of years to get out of it.” In the interview Renner talked about legislative changes that will supposedly end the “wild, wild west of litigation practices” driven by “unscrupulous contractors” that has resulted in the most expensive homeowner premiums in the country.

“And that had caused a lot of our insurers to go out of business and leave the state billions and billions of loss and dollars of losses. And so people looked at the state of Florida from the insurance market and said, stay away,” Renner said in the interview.

Renner acknowledged in the interview that the “reforms have not yet hit the consumer,” who is beset by “price increases” due to claims stemming from Hurricanes Ian and Nicole last year. These “are really creating some pressure on the back end of these reforms that we haven’t got out from under yet, but we will get out from under it,” Renner claimed.

The Speaker claimed in the interview that “new insurers are coming into the market.” New insurance companies are necessary as more and more homeowners have found their only option to be a policy from Citizens Insurance, which is the insurer of last resort in Florida.

“And for those that don’t know, it’s supposed to be a last resort. If you can’t get anywhere else, you go to this government run Citizen’s program. And we have a real big number of folks that are on Citizens. We’ve got to depopulate that,” said Renner.

Renner is just the latest state official to tell Floridians that finding insurance in the Florida market may be challenging.

Gov. Ron DeSantis said, “I think they’re going to wait through this hurricane season and then I think they’re going to be willing to deploy more capital to Florida,” in a recent radio interview. “So, knock on wood, we won’t have a big storm this summer. Then I think you’re going to start to see companies see an advantage.”

Not all republican politicians are so optimistic about Florida’s insurance market, particularly since Farmers Insurance recently pulled out of the Florida market altogether. 

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott recently said the recent departure of Farmers Insurance was a “wake-up call” to the state. “Stop and think about it, here’s what happens for a company like Farmers to leave,” Scott said during a press conference. “They’ve spent years and decades to build up that clientele and just walk away. So, this is a wake-up call to the state.”

Farmers was not the only insurer to leave the state, seven insurers went insolvent in the last year. Scott urged Florida legislators to speak with companies leaving the state.

“What you have to do is you have to sit down with the companies,” Scott said. “State Farm had left the state before I became Governor. I sat down with State Farm and said, ‘What are your issues?’ It always comes down to fraud. It always comes down to, there’s fraud going on in the market and guess what? If there’s fraud you pay for it because insurance is a shared cost.”

“So, I think what the state has to do is it’s got to sit down with Farmers, State Farm, all these companies and say, ‘What are the problems?’ Then what legislation do you need to get rid of it?” Scott continued.