Fla. Insurance Companies Ranked By Policy Count
State Farm Florida ranks third in Florida property insurance policies. The Florida branch of the national insurer has kept this secret for eight years.
Florida’s largest property insurer, Citizens Property Insurance Corp., is state-owned. Second is Fort Lauderdale-based Universal Property and Casualty.
The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation released policy counts of all 126 state-regulated property insurers for the first time since 2014. The three companies’ Florida market shares were revealed.
A May special legislative session enacted insurance reforms that required market share list release. State Farm Florida and other major insurers had been invoking a “trade secret” exemption since 2014 to hide how they share Florida’s residential marketplace. The reform bill eliminated this exemption.
Insurers can still withhold policy counts for Florida’s 67 counties under the new law. They must report statewide policy coverage, additions, cancellations, and nonrenewals quarterly. The Office of Insurance Regulation posted third-quarter 2022 details on its website in December. An office spokeswoman said fourth-quarter data will be posted in mid-March.
The list allows market share comparisons between 2022 and a decade ago, when policy counts for each company were still public.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel found that the latest list differs from 2012, when the industry was dealing with high sinkhole claims, the private market was still recovering from a barrage of hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004 and 2005, and the state was just starting its effort to move policies out of Citizens and into newly created “takeout companies.”
The 2022 list includes 42 companies that were not doing business in the state in 2012, but it is missing 32 companies from 2012.
Citizens, Universal Property & Casualty, and State Farm Florida remain the top three insurers in Florida.
Legislators ordered release.
Paul Handerhan, president of the Florida-based Federal Association for Insurance Reform, said lawmakers decided to require public release of the complete data because the number of companies asserting “trade secret” made it difficult for even the Legislature to analyze the private market during insurance bill debates (FAIR).
Handerhan said the Office of Insurance Regulation made incomplete legislative presentations every year.
He called requiring the full list “a good thing,” even though it mostly benefits analysts and groups like FAIR that can use the data to make policy recommendations.
He said consumers can use the data to find companies adding policies, which usually means they are financially stable enough to take on more risk. He said that if a company has significantly reduced its policy count, it may have had to reduce its exposure due to a lack of claims-paying capital.
Mark Friedlander, corporate communications director for the nonprofit Insurance Information Institute, funded by national insurance companies, advised against judging companies based on 10-year policy count changes.
“I have seen many insurers grow their policy count year-over-year but generate an underwriting loss and negative net income,” Friedlander said by email. “Premium growth does not guarantee financial stability. One of many company health indicators. The combined ratio, surplus growth, and loss ratio are also important.
Citizens’ policy count spanned a decade. Citizens’ policy count grows when customers can’t find an affordable private-market insurer, unlike private-market companies.
However, comparing the decade-apart numbers shows that Citizens had 363,695 fewer policies in 2022 than 1.43 million a decade earlier, which could be a good sign.
The comparison does not show that Citizens had reduced its policy count by more than 1 million after 2012 and was down to about 420,000 in 2019—below Universal—before rising to 1.07 million by the third quarter of 2022.
Lawmakers and industry watchdogs worry that Citizens’ recent growth will force insurance consumers statewide to pay special assessments if it can’t pay claims after a series of catastrophic storms. Over the past year, several reforms have raised premiums and made the company less attractive than private-market competitors.
Top firms added policies
Universal is second again behind Citizens with 629,229 policies, up 76,681 from 2012. “It is difficult to make generalizations about data points that are 10 years apart, especially when many significant factors have influenced the Florida residential property market at various points during that period,” spokesman Travis Miller said by email when asked about the net increase.
“The information does reflect the consistency of [Universal’s] efforts in being a primary choice of consumers and agents for their residential insurance needs,” Miller said.
StateFarm After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, State Farm spun off Florida, which now has 558,604 policies.
State Farm Florida was the first major insurer to claim a “trade secret” exemption to prevent the Office of Insurance Regulation from publishing its county-level policy data. State Farm Florida claimed in court filings that the data gave competitors an unfair advantage by revealing its business concentration.
After a three-year court battle with the Office of Insurance Regulation, the company was able to claim a trade secret over the data in 2017. After State Farm won, 21 other insurers declared their data trade secrets.
The Office of Insurance Regulation withheld those companies’ county-level and state-level data from market share reports on its website.
“State Farm continues to maintain the financial strength to be there for our Florida customers,” State Farm Florida spokeswoman Roszell Gadson said of its number three ranking in the newly released statewide data. We are proud to keep our promises to be there when they need us.”
Additions, deletions
Since 2012, 32 companies have left Florida’s market due to bankruptcy, mergers, acquisitions, or loss of appetite for Florida risks. St. Johns Insurance Co., the fourth-largest personal residential insurer in 2012 with 175,279 policies, failed. February 2022 saw its liquidation.
Southern Fidelity (76,624 2012 policies), Universal Insurance Company of North America (70,393), and FedNat are other failed companies not on the 2022 list (57,637).
However, 42 companies have entered the state since 2012, and not all started before the industry’s fortunes began to sour in 2017.
Heritage Property & Casualty (No. 9), a publicly traded company seeded with Citizens take-out customers in 2013, is on the 2022 list. By 2015, Heritage had 247,000 policies, but by 2022, 175,869.
No. 16 Kin Interinsurance Network, a tech startup, uses publicly available data to price homes in risky states like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. Kin was Florida’s 16th largest home insurer in 2022 with 102,998 policies after debuting in 2017.
After agreeing to buy up to 147,000 St. Johns-stranded policies, Tampa-based Slide Insurance Company, founded in February 2022 by former Heritage CEO Bruce Lucas, rose to 17th place.
In 2017, many private-market companies lost market share and profits after a decade without hurricanes. Hurricane Irma hit southern Florida and swept north, damaging all 67 counties and costing $50 billion.
The year after a Florida Supreme Court ruling made it easier for policyholders to sue and collect damages from their insurers. Since 2017, many insurance companies have gone bankrupt or left the state due to the ruling and destructive hurricanes.
Policy-count increases between 2012 and 2022 mostly occurred before 2017. The 10-year comparison doesn’t show some companies’ decline or stagnation since 2017.
Robert Ritchie, CEO of American Integrity Insurance, added 170,742 policies between 2012 and 2022 but only 20,405 since 2017. After the December 2016 Supreme Court ruling, the legal crisis began in early 2017. Since then, American Integrity has been flat. Profitable and surplus growth occurred from 2012 to 2016.
Since 2017, “No profits means no surplus growth, which means flat or declining policy count for most carriers,” Ritchie said.
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